The root cause of Middle Eastern turmoil, according to a broad consensus of the international media and the considered cerebrations of the deepest-thinking movie stars, is Israeli settlers in what are described as the "occupied territories" on the West Bank of the Jordan River. Even such celebrated and fervent supporters of Israel as Alan Dershowitz and Bernard-Henri Lévy put the settlers beyond the pale of their Zionist sympathies. Remove the settlers, according to these sage analyses of the scene, and the problems of the region become remediable at last............................

My point of course being that when folks are asking Israel to negotiate with Hamas, give land up up front, etc. this is with whom they are being asked to negotiate. In addition to the killings/executions/murders seen here, there were many others that were accomplished to the Fatah folks simply being thrown from the roofs of tall buildings.

My point of course being that when folks are asking Israel to negotiate with Hamas, give land up up front, etc. this is with whom they are being asked to negotiate. In addition to the killings/executions/murders seen here, there were many others that were accomplished to the Fatah folks simply being thrown from the roofs of tall buildings.

It's a unique religious ontology! Your ethnocentrism is obviously blinding you to the sublime beauty of islamic culture and sharia.

My point of course being that when folks are asking Israel to negotiate with Hamas, give land up up front, etc. this is with whom they are being asked to negotiate. In addition to the killings/executions/murders seen here, there were many others that were accomplished to the Fatah folks simply being thrown from the roofs of tall buildings.

This wouldn't happen if the Israelis were only nicer! Am I right, JDN?

Citing Noam Chomsky again? Talk about ignorant. You do realize that he's a lunatic anti-semite and Cambodian holocaust denier, right? Another fraud who's only credential is leftist orientation. It's sad that someone with a post graduate education has only deluded indoctrination to show for it.

Chomsky, now a 73-year-old grandfather living in suburban Massachusetts, has worked for decades to win that cachet. Avram Noam was born in Philadelphia in 1928. His parents, William and Elsie Chomsky, had fled from czarist oppression in Russia to the City of Brotherly Love, where William established himself as a Hebrew scholar and grammarian. Radical politics aroused the young Noam—at ten, he wrote a school newspaper editorial on the Spanish Civil War, lamenting the rise of fascism, and two years later he embraced the anarchism that he still adheres to today. By the age of 16, the bright, ambitious youth had enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania, where he eventually earned a Ph.D. in linguistics. Passed over for a teaching position at Harvard, he landed in 1955 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he has remained ever since.

Most linguistics professors would have toiled in obscurity in a science-and-industry school like MIT. Not Chomsky. In the 1950s, he brashly challenged psychologist B. F. Skinner’s theory of language as a learned skill, acquired by children in a process of reward and punishment. Chomsky claimed instead that when we learn a language as children, we can articulate and understand all sorts of sentences that we’ve never actually come across before. “What we ‘know,’ therefore,” Chomsky held, “must be something deeper—a grammar—that makes an infinite variety of sentences possible.” In Chomsky’s view, the capacity to master the structures of grammar is genetically determined, a product of our evolutionary development. This idea—that grammar is hardwired in the labyrinth of DNA—shook the walls of linguistics departments across the globe. Chomsky promoted his theory tirelessly, defending it in countless symposia and scholarly reviews. By the mid-sixties, he was an academic superstar; in the seventies, researchers at Columbia University even named a chimpanzee trained to learn 125 words “Nim Chimpsky” in his honor.

With this fame as a base, the professor proceeded to wander far from his area of expertise. Such uses of fame, ironically, are common in the country Chomsky attacks so relentlessly. In America, you come across two kinds of fame: vertical and horizontal. The vertical celebrity owes his renown to one thing—Luciano Pavarotti, for example, is famous for his singing, period. The horizontal celebrity, conversely, merchandises his fame by convincing the public that his mastery of one field is transferable to another. Thus singers Barbra Streisand and Bono give speeches on public policy; thus linguistics professor Chomsky poses as an expert on geopolitics.

Chomsky first employed his horizontal celebrity during the 1960s, when he spoke out forcefully against the Vietnam War. His 1969 collection of agitated writings, American Power and the New Mandarins, indicted the nation’s brainwashed “elites”—read: government bureaucrats and intellectuals who disagreed with him on the morality of the war. But Vietnam was only the beginning: over the next three decades, Chomsky published a steady stream of political books and pamphlets boasting titles like What Uncle Sam Really Wants and Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies—all of them filled with heated attacks on American policies, domestic and foreign.

Those attacks would be laughable if some people didn’t take them seriously. Here’s a small but representative sample. The goal of America, Chomsky charges, “is a society in which the basic unit is you and your television set. If the kid next door is hungry, it’s not your problem. If the retired couple next door invested their assets badly and are now starving, that’s not your problem either.” Prisons and inner-city schools, Chomsky maintains, “target a kind of superfluous population that there’s no point in educating because there’s nothing for them to do. Because we’re a civilized people, we put them in prison, rather than sending death squads out to murder them.” Another example: “When you come back from the Third World to the West—the U.S. in particular—you are struck by the narrowing of thought and understanding, the limited nature of legitimate discussion, the separation of people from each other.”

Goodness. But if America is all about ignoring hungry children, why does the country spend billions in public and private funds every year on the poor? Does America deliberately seek to mis-educate and send to prison a “superfluous” population? Wouldn’t today’s knowledge-based economy benefit from as many decently educated people as it could find? What Third World countries does Chomsky have in mind where the discussion is more freewheeling and open than in the U.S.? Algeria? Cuba? Such puerile leftism is scarcely worthy of a college sophomore.

If possible, however, Chomsky’s assessment of U.S. foreign policy is even more absurd. The nightmare of American evil began in 1812, he thinks, when the U.S. instigated a process that “annihilated the indigenous [American] population (millions of people), conquered half of Mexico, intervened violently in the surrounding region, conquered Hawaii and the Philippines (killing hundreds of thousands of Filipinos), and in the past half century particularly, extended its resort to force throughout much of the world.” That the U.S. saved the Philippines during World War II, that Hawaiians voted to become the fiftieth state, that every day Mexicans pour across the border to take part in the economy of the hated United States—all of that is irrelevant to Chomsky. He believes in the Beaumarchais mode of political debate: “Vilify, vilify, some of it will always stick.”

For Chomsky, turn over any monster anywhere and look at the underside. Each is clearly marked: MADE IN AMERICA. The cold war? All America’s fault: “The United States was picking up where the Nazis had left off.” Castro’s executions and prisons filled with dissenters? Irrelevant, for “Cuba has probably been the target of more international terrorism [from the U.S., of course] than any other country.” The Khmer Rouge? Back in 1977, Chomsky dismissed accounts of the Cambodian genocide as “tales of Communist atrocities” based on “unreliable” accounts. At most, the executions “numbered in the thousands” and were “aggravated by the threat of starvation resulting from American distraction and killing.” In fact, some 2 million perished on the killing fields of Cambodia because of genocidal war against the urban bourgeoisie and the educated, in which wearing a pair of glasses could mean a death sentence.

The Chomskian rage hasn’t confined itself to his native land. He has long nourished a special contempt for Israel, lone outpost of Western ideals in the Middle East. The hatred has been so intense that Zionists have called him a self-hating Jew. This is an unfair label. Clearly, Chomsky has no deficit in the self-love department, and his ability to stir up antagonism makes him even more pleased with himself. No doubt that was why he wrote the introduction to a book by French Holocaust-denier Robert Faurisson. Memoire en Defense maintains that Hitler’s death camps and gas chambers, even Anne Frank’s diary, are fictions, created to serve the cause of American Zionists. That was too much for Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, who challenged fellow leftist Chomsky to a debate. In the debate, Dershowitz keyed in on the fact that Chomsky had described Faurisson’s conclusions as “findings,” and claimed that they grew out of “extensive historical research.” But as numerous scholars had shown, Faurisson was not a serious scholar at all, but rather a sophist who simply ignored the mountain of documents, speeches, testimony, and other historical evidence that conflicted with his “argument.” Dershowitz noted that Chomsky also wrote the following: “I see no anti-Semitic implication in the denial of the existence of gas chambers or even in the denial of the Holocaust.”

Just recently, Chomsky spearheaded a group pressuring universities to divest themselves of any stock connected with the Jewish state: Israel equals South Africa in the Chomskian universe of moral equivalence. Here, happily, Chomsky got nowhere. He obtained 400 signatures for his movement; opposing him, Lawrence Summers, president of Harvard, gathered 4,000 signatures in support of Israel. The controversy set Dershowitz off again. This time, he said, he wanted the MIT prof to debate him “on the morality of this selective attack against an American ally that is defending itself—and the world—against terrorism that targets civilians.” He pointed out that universities have always invested in companies head-quartered in foreign nations with unsavory reputations—countries whose citizens don’t have the freedom the Israelis enjoy or suffer the terror they endure. “Yet this petition focused only on the Jewish State, to the exclusion of all others, including those which, by any reasonable standard, are among the worst violators of human rights. This is bigotry pure and simple.” Chomsky declined the challenge.

Interesting that one so ignorant as myself keeps having to school you on the academic frauds you cite as sources, eh Andrew?

When I was about 16 as part of an audience of about 250 I once heard NC speak against the War in Vietnam at the Ethical Culture Society on Central Park West in Manhattan against the War in Vietnam. I thought he was very bright, and shared his anger about the War and since them have kept an eye on him from time to time over the years. My thinking about many things since I was 16 has changed a lot. NC's thinking? Not so much Indeed I wonder how he can be so specious on so many points yet be taken seriously by obviously bright and educated people such as our AB.

I think GM's article gets him about right; that point about horizontal fame is dead on.

I have not had a chance yet to go through all the clips that AB posted, and while I indeed find a few of them interesting and reflection provoking in a mournful "the tragedy of it all" kind of way, I find more of them deceptive in what is left out. What is the barrier that the Israelis are defending for example? I note how much trust there is in the ultimate decency of the Isreali soldiers. I don't think any of those croweds trying to force their way through checkpoint (across Israeli border?) would be doing the same against those Hamas fellows who gunned down the prone hog tied Fatah people! I find others to be such wild Orwellian Big Lie bullexcrement that I scarcely know where to begin. In additional but smaller import I saw one famous picture of a man huddling with a boy who was shot; alleged to a great hue and cry to have been shot by the Israeli soldiers-- of course once the howling press mob had moved on there was no coverage of the careful analysis which showed that it was a propaganda fraud. I saw assertion od data whose provencance was completely unknown.

Interesting that one so ignorant as myself keeps having to school you on the academic frauds you cite as sources, eh Andrew?

meh, frauds ? Like the Said "fraud" that i wrote some 600 words about how it was fabricated and devoid of any proof from the side that attacked him ? Counter proof from 5 different sources, forgot to read that I presume ?

Ah, so how exactly is chomsky a "fraud" ? By the geometrical standards from the article, every single one of us on this forum, we are all frauds. "Experts" on whole spectres of experties, horizontal, vertical, spherical, you name it. From war, to religion to economy and government and beyond, we all know what to do. Bedroom strategos.

I wrote a mastodon of an essay again, but just deleted it.

Just read a book from someone you dont agree with once in a while. Not shun it. Read it, study it. With the same glasses you read what you go to bed with every night.

HUMANISTICS IS NOT EXACT SCIENCE WITH MEASURABLE DIFFERENCES AND PERMANENT TRUTHS. IT IS A CONSTELATION OF OPINIONS. LEARN THEM ALL.

Defaulting to the "fake but true" defense, Andrew? The points you tried to raise for Fast Eddie Said were taken apart. The fact that academia still ignores his stunning lack of integrity shows the depth of corruption. As you yourself point out, Chomsky is a linguistics professor and yet his anti-western, pro-communist diatribes are treated by the left/and the leftist academic indoctrination complex as the gold standard for geopolitics. Just as with the global warming frauds, the left won't let the truth get in the way of their agenda. Just as the left has destroyed journalism, it's destroying academia with leftist corruption such as postmodernism and marxism (the flat-earther-ism of economics), yet because Marx is the pseudo-god of the left's Marxist belief system, the fact that Marxism has resulted in nothing but horrific oppression, poverty and mass graves is ignored because you so want to believe in the same tragic lies that always end with the same tragic results.

Let me explain something about a cultural difference between europeans and Americans. Americans fought so we don't have to bow before titles. Europe has never gotten past the idea of the "elites" who should rule over the ignorant masses. Today, the left fancies it's self as the "elite" who should rule while it pays lip service to "the people". There is a common joke here about "B.S., M.S. and then Piled higher and Deeper".

America was supposed to be run by the people who have the freedom of speech to exchange ideas. The disfunction in the US we see today is because of citizens who have neglected their due dilligence responsibilities and the cultural damage from the marxist influences that have crept in since the 60's.

I've spent plenty of time reading and listening to leftist ideas, it's why I'm so well versed in the frauds you like to cite to support your position.

Israeli Says Palestinian Thinker Has Falsified His Early Life By JANNY SCOTT

Edward W. Said, the literary critic and intellectual who has long been one of the most eloquent proponents of the Palestinian cause, has been accused by an Israeli scholar of misrepresenting his early childhood in order to lend poignancy and power to his political stance.

In an article in the September issue of Commentary, which Mr. Said disputes, Justus Reid Weiner accuses him of cultivating a moving personal story of an idyllic childhood spent in Palestine that was abruptly shattered by exile to Cairo shortly before Israeli independence in 1948. In fact, Mr. Weiner says, Mr. Said's childhood home was Cairo. Although Mr. Said was born and baptized in Jerusalem, Mr. Weiner says he found no evidence that Mr. Said's parents owned the house there that he has reminisced about living in and no record that he attended fulltime the school he seemed to suggest he had.

In an interview late Tuesday, Mr. Said denied ever having misrepresented his past. He insisted he had always made it clear that he had grown up not only in Jerusalem but also in Egypt and Lebanon. He said his family had frequently traveled between Cairo and Jerusalem.

He said his father, Wadie Said, ran the Cairo branch of a family business; his cousin, Boulos Said, ran the Jerusalem branch. He said his father was a ''partner'' in the house in Jerusalem where Boulos Said lived with his wife, who was Wadie Said's sister, and where Wadie Said's family often stayed.

As for the school, St. George's preparatory school -- where a profile of Mr. Said in Current Biography Yearbook said his extracurricular activities included riding, boxing, gymnastics and piano -- he said Tuesday that he was enrolled there ''for a few months in 1947.'' Otherwise, he was in school in Egypt.

''I have never said I am a refugee,'' said Mr. Said, a professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and the author of more than a dozen books. ''Never in my life. On the contrary, I go out of my way to say I had a very privileged life, we had a house in Cairo.''

On the other hand, he added, ''The fact is that of the rest of my family -- not my immediate family but all of my cousins and aunts and uncles -- not a single member of my family remained in Palestine after 1948. They were all, without exception, evicted. That's the central point.''

However, in an article published in 1998 in The London Review of Books quoted by Mr. Weiner, Mr. Said wrote, ''I was born in Jerusalem and had spent most of my formative years there and, after 1948, when my entire family became refugees, in Egypt.''

Mr. Said, who is 63, is widely admired as one of the most influential literary critics alive. He is also despised by many conservatives. He writes frequently about the Palestinian cause, was a member of the Palestinian National Council until 1991 and is a relentless critic of Israeli policy on the Palestinians and of the Oslo peace accords.

Mr. Weiner is a lawyer and scholar in residence at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, which describes itself as an independent think tank. He emigrated from the United States to Israel in 1981 and spent 12 years working in the human rights department of the Israeli Ministry of Justice.

In an interview, Mr. Weiner said he spent three years investigating Mr. Said's life, looking through everything from baptismal and tax records and business directories to student registration books in Jerusalem and Cairo. He even toured the Jerusalem house to see whether two large families could fit.

He did not interview Mr. Said. He said he left one message with Mr. Said's assistant at Columbia two and a half years ago, explaining what he had found and asking Mr. Said to call. When Mr. Said did not call, he said, he never tried again. Mr. Said says he never received any such call.

Mr. Said's memoir, ''Out of Place,'' in which he describes his childhood in Cairo in great detail, is scheduled to be published by Alfred A. Knopf next month. Mr. Weiner suggests Mr. Said, who learned in 1991 that he had leukemia, wrote the memoir to ''camouflage and backfill,'' having caught wind of Mr. Weiner's research -- a suggestion Mr. Said dismissed as ''rubbish.''

In the article in Commentary, a neoconservative magazine that has an interest in Jewish affairs and that once published an article on Mr. Said entitled ''Professor of Terror,'' Mr. Weiner cites numerous instances in which Mr. Said seems to have left the impression that he had spent his early years in Jerusalem.

For example, Mr. Weiner describes a 1998 documentary entitled ''In Search of Palestine'' that Mr. Said helped make for the BBC, which included recent footage of him and his son outside the house in Jerusalem and footage of Mr. Said touring St. George's preparatory school.

But Mr. Weiner says the title deed of the house listed only the family of Boulos Said. He says he found no listing of Wadie Said in Jerusalem's telephone and commercial directories. Having gone in and measured the house, he says it was too small to house two large, prosperous families together.

Asked whether his time in Jerusalem might have been overstated, Mr. Said said, ''I had a very itinerant life.''

''And I don't think it's that important, in any case. It doesn't make that much difference to the case I'm representing. I never have represented my case as the issue to be treated. I've represented the case of my people, which is something quite different.''

I'm surprised at you GM. You can't seem to challenge much of Andrew's logic or references (it's nice to read two sides to the story although I don't always agree) so you attack his sources. Didn't you once before criticize me for attacking one of your sources, saying that was the mark of someone who has nothing to say?

In contrast, Mr. Weiner's (a nobody) rants sound like he is is on a witch hunt; much more credible is Dr. Edward Said who was an esteemed professor at Columbia. The man is absolutely brilliant. The fact that he is "despised by many conservatives" well that's just jealousy for his ability to convey the Palestinian cause. Weiner is the one who will be ignored, Dr. Said's place in history will be remembered for a long time.

The fact that Edward Said, a Christian is "eloquent proponent of the Palestinian cause" bothers you to no end.

GM, you said, "There is a common joke here about "B.S., M.S. and then Piled higher and Deeper". Where is "here". A place where people are petty and simply jealous? A place wherepeople don't even have a four year college degree? Much less a Phd degree?

Most of the Phd's I know here in LA are quite smart; that doesn't mean I always agree with them, but they are usually bright and well read and often/usually add to the conversation.

As usual JDN, you miss the point. Said is a fraud. The fact that despite his lies he is still lauded in academia demonstrates the intellectual and ethical rot that has settled so deeply within much of modern scholarship. "Piled higher and Deeper" refers to the difference between being educated and being credentialed. As an example, the buffoon we have in white house is the product of such a system. He has never held a real job and has no real accomplishments and can't understand why everything he halfway payed attention to in his leftist indoctrination program doesn't work in the real world. He did however learn, like Said and Ward Churchill that as long as you fabricate a narrative that pleases the leftist paradigm in academia, you can coast along on that alone with all the rewards the system can confiscate from those that actually do tangible work.

Jonah Goldberg: Taken in by 'Gay Girl'The 'Gay Girl in Damascus' hoax is worse than a lie. It's propaganda. ShareNew(0) By Jonah Goldberg

June 14, 2011I'd barely followed "A Gay Girl In Damascus" until last week, when Daily Beast columnist Peter Beinart posted something to Twitter: "This is really important — this woman is a hero," with a link to a story about Amina Abdallah Arraf, a Syrian American woman and the author of the blog "A Gay Girl In Damascus." According to the story, Amina had been seized by Syrian security forces for her dissident writing.

Quickly, Amina's arrest became a new Internet cause. Even the U.S. State Department joined the effort.

And soon thereafter, the whole thing fell apart. Amina never existed. The author of "A Gay Girl In Damascus" was in fact a 40-year-old straight dude from Georgia living in Scotland. Rather than the sexy young lesbian in the photos (stolen from the Facebook page of a Croatian expat living in London), the photo of him in the Washington Post shows a man who looks like the bearded comic-actor Zach Galifianakis — in a Che Guevara T-shirt, naturally.

Tom MacMaster was raised to be a peace activist. When he was a kid, the family trekked to the Pentagon to hand out origami doves to commemorate the bombing of Nagasaki. He's the co-director of Atlanta Palestine Solidarity and claims to have visited Baghdad on a "student peace mission" to deter the Iraq war.

In an "Apology to Readers" posted on June 12 from his vacation in Istanbul, MacMaster writes, "While the narrative voice may have been fictional, the facts on this blog are true and not misleading as to the situation on the ground."

He explains that as a white guy with an Anglo name, people wouldn't take him seriously in online discussion groups. So he made up Amina and her countless fictional experiences in Syria and America.

Friend and foe alike have wondered how Barack Obama wangled a seat next to Edward Said (pronounced sigh-EED), at an Arab-American community dinner in Chicago in 1998 on the fiftieth anniversary of the Palestinian nakbah, or disaster.

At the time, Obama was an obscure state senator and Said, according to the Nation, was "probably the best-known intellectual in the world."

It is possible that the pair had met when Obama was a student and Said a professor at Columbia University. The Los Angeles Times has reported that Obama took at least one course taught by Said.

It is possible, too, that Said and Obama ran in the same radical New York circles. Among Said's friends and allies on the America-phobic, Arafat-loving left was none other than Bill Ayers. When Ayers published his memoir Fugitive Days in 2001, Said was happy to provide a blurb. "For anyone who cares about the sorry mess we are in," wrote Said, "this book is essential, indeed necessary reading."

Whatever their prior relationship, photos of the 1998 event show Obama and Said immersed in deep conversation. As to its content, Said might have been reassuring the newly minted author that yes, if you can trace your ancestors' roots to the third world, and yes, if you toe the progressive line, you can make up your whole life story and get away with it. Said knew. He had been there, done that, gotten the T-shirt.

Twenty years earlier, Said had published his masterwork, Orientalism, a book so influential that it changed the very direction of Middle Eastern studies. The book's thesis was a bold one in 1978. Writing in full postmodern patois, then still cutting-edge, Said argued that the Western study of the Middle East was inherently corrupted by the position of power from which the observer wrote. In other words, westerners had no right to even think of writing Middle Eastern history.

Said's identity as a Palestinian and a refugee informed everything he wrote, Orientalism most certainly. "Orientalism is written out of an extremely concrete history of personal loss and national disintegration," Said observes in the Afterword of the book's 1994 edition. It is this sense of loss that gives the book its spirit of righteous certainty.

Said's Palestinian childhood became the central, compelling metaphor for his significant life work. "Mr. Said was born in Jerusalem and spent the first twelve years of his life there," confirms the New York Times in a flattering 1998 article. His family left the house and "fled" Palestine for Cairo in late 1947, "five months before war broke out between Palestinian Arabs and Jews over plans to partition Palestine."

Said set out to right past wrongs and succeeded brilliantly. His timing was impeccable. Multiculturalism was still in its embryonic stages, and by fusing it to postmodernism, Said helped to define it. For someone who allegedly did "not exist," Said did a masterful job of making his presence felt.

For fourteen years, he served on the Palestine National Conference, a kind of Parliament-in-exile alongside the likes of the PLO's Yassir Arafat and still-harder-core radicals from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the terrorist group that hijacked the MS Achille Lauro.

Although he denounced violence, Said was forever rationalizing its use and was once photographed on the Lebanese border throwing a rock at Israel as "a symbolic gesture of joy."

Throughout his career, Said returned again and again to the source of his own moral power -- his forced exile from "my beautiful old house" in Jerusalem. So central was the house at 10 Brenner Street to his identity that the Palestinian Heritage Association presented him with a portrait of it during a ceremony in his honor.

In early 1992, Said paid a nostalgic visit to this house, a visit that was celebrated in a Harper's Magazine and eventually in a BBC documentary, In Search of Palestine. One scene in the film shows Said and his son in front of the house "my family owned" while Said angrily talks about getting the house back from the Israeli authorities.

Whether Said knew it or not, however, time was running out on the compelling saga of his own life that he had gone to such pains to shape and share with the world.

By 1998, the year the documentary aired, an Israeli scholar named Justus Reid Weiner had already done two years of hard-nosed, boots-on-the-ground background research on Said's life, and he was about to deconstruct the heck out of it. "Virtually everything I learned," Weiner wrote, "contradicts the story of Said's early life as Said has told it."

Weiner released his findings a year later in the September 1999 issue of the influential Jewish magazine, Commentary. In truth, Said had better establishment credentials than anyone suspected, right down to his Episcopalian upbringing.

The son of an affluent, American immigrant father who had fought under General Pershing in World War I, Said attended the Mount Hermon School in Massachusetts and Princeton University before moving on to Harvard. It was the first twelve years of his life, however, that would truly raise eyebrows.

"I was born, in November 1935," Said wrote in Harper's in 1992, "in Talbiya, then a mostly new and prosperous Arab quarter of Jerusalem. By the end of 1947, just months before Talbiya fell to Jewish forces, I'd left with my family for Cairo." After their forced departure, he wrote in a 1998 London Review of Books, "... my entire family became refugees in Egypt."

Yes, Said was born in Jerusalem in 1935. He was born there because his mother had had a tragic experience with Egyptian health care -- her first son, Gerald, died during childbirth. After Edward's birth, the family returned to Cairo, where his father had been living for the last decade.

There, Said's father continued to expand his extremely successful office supply business and moved the family through an increasingly luxurious series of apartments. A Christian and an American citizen from birth, Said attended the best British schools in Cairo before leaving for a pricey American prep school as a teenager.

The famed house, Weiner learned, belonged not to Said's parents, but to his Jerusalem relatives. During almost all of the years Said was alleged to be living there, the Said relatives rented the upstairs apartment to the Kingdom of Yugoslavia for a consulate's use. In a truly odd twist of fate, they rented the downstairs apartment of the renowned Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, who moved there after fleeing Nazi Germany in 1938. In 1942, the Said relatives forced Buber out in a rent dispute and occupied the apartment themselves.

One would think that in all his public recollections of this house, Said might have remembered sharing it with Buber or the Yugoslav consulate, but he did not. It is possible, in fact, that he never even stayed there. The apartment would have been too small for his Jerusalem relatives to share with their prosperous Cairo cousins if they had come to visit.

Said was busted big time. Weiner had proved beyond all doubt that America's most celebrated Palestinian refugee was not really a Palestinian or a refugee, let alone a Muslim. Indeed, during the century's most turbulent years, 1935-1947, years that witnessed the death and dispossession of scores of millions of innocent people, Said had been living high on the hog in Cairo. The whole moral basis for his post-colonial posturing as a victim of western injustice seemed shot.

Although its headline suggests a nationalist bias on Weiner's part -- "Israeli Says Palestinian Thinker Has Falsified His Early Life" -- the New York Times gave his exposé decent coverage. If Said could ignore Weiner, he could not ignore the Times. His comments are instructive and all too typical. "I have never said I am a refugee," he told the Times. "Never in my life. On the contrary, I go out of my way to say I had a very privileged life, we had a house in Cairo."

Just a year earlier, remember, the Times had interviewed Said and written, "Mr. Said was born in Jerusalem and spent the first twelve years of his life there." Until caught by Weiner, this is what Said had told everyone.

By the time Said died four years later, however, the controversy had died as well. The Guardian of London does not even hint at one. Its obituary closed with a tribute from UN Secretary General Kofi Annan saying, "Both the Middle East and the United States will be the poorer without his distinctive voice."

The New York Times raised the Weiner objection, but it did so dismissively, 2,000 words into a glowing 2,600-word obituary. In the beginning of the obituary, the "paper of record" had already decided to revive Said's imaginary past.

Edward Said was born in Jerusalem on Nov. 1, 1935, and spent his childhood in a well-to-do neighborhood of thick-walled stone houses that is now one of the main Jewish districts of the city. His father, a prosperous businessman who had lived in the United States, took the family to Cairo in 1947 after the United Nations divided Jerusalem into Jewish and Arab halves.

It should matter that Said lied about his personal history, but ultimately for me the larger point is the hatred to be found within the Muslim Arab mindset. When there are no Jews to hate, then the next handy non-Muslim target will do just fine, see e.g. what is happening to the Coptic Christians right now in Egypt.

There is also a , , , words fail me here , , , sociopathic inability to understand that one's own actions may have something to do with how people act towards you. For example, in one of Andraz's videos there is footage of the wall that Israel built as an example of terrible Israeli oppression, but no sense that all the suicide murder terror attacks that were being launched from the West Bank caused it nor apparently is there any awareness that the wall has pretty much succeeded in stopping them.

For more on Pallywood, including extensive raw footage revealing some of its most pervasive activity, see The Second Draft’s dossier.

PALLYWOOD: HISTORY

DEFINITION

The term “Pallywood” refers to the staging of scenes by Palestinian journalists in order to present the Palestinians as hapless victims of Israeli aggression. They are able to succeed in this endeavor in large part due to the credulity and eagerness of the Western press to present these images, which reinforce the image of the Palestinian David struggling valiantly against the overpowering Israeli Goliath. Pallywood has led to astonishing lapses in Western journalistic standards in which badly staged scenes regularly appear on the news as “real events.” This page attempts to outline how such lapses could have come about, producing the current situation.

MAJOR STAGES IN THE EMERGENCE OF PALLYWOOD

1982: Lebanon invasion

The earliest clear signs of an emerging Pallywood come from the Lebanese invasion of 1982. There, for the first time, the media seems to have embraced an openly hostile stance towards Israel, which led to a widely discussed article entitled “J’Accuse” (Commentary, September 1983), by Norman Podhoretz who charged America’s leading journalists, newspapers and television networks with “anti-Semitism.” The alleged hostility was characterized by the following incidents:

- Using Arafat’s brother, Fathi Arafat, head of the Palestinian Red Crescent, Palestinian sources claimed 10,000 dead and 600,000 refugees from the Israeli onslaught. Without checking to see how many people lived in southern Lebanon (300,000), the media repeated these figures constantly (pp. 300-301), until they became widely accepted.

- Reporters comparing the siege of Beirut with the Nazi siege of Warsaw. Of all the sieges of cities in 20th century warfare, it would be harder to find a more inappropriate one, and yet the analogy between Israelis and Nazis seems to have had an almost irresistable lure to some journalists. Among the most aggressive reporters was Peter Jennings. For a discussion of his work, see here and here.

- The use of clearly false images by a press eager to believe the worst of the Israeli army, including images of areas devastated in the civil war between Palestinians and Lebanese, dead babies that were not dead, etc (pp. 353-389).

- Coverage of Sabra and Shatilla massacres that left many under the impression that Israeli soldiers had massacred Palestinian refugees, and failed to inform people of why the Phalange wanted to take vengeance. Everyone has heard of Sabra and Shatilla; Only recently have people started to hear of Darfur. The stark contrast between the hundreds of dead at Sabra and Shatilla and the over ten thousand dead at Hama, a town in the heart of Syria, the same year, illustrates both the medias penchant for reporting any Israeli misdeed no matter how removed direct culpability, and the power of intimidation and (no) access journalism to silence them on matters of Arab misdeeds (see Friedman, From Beirut to Jerusalém, chap. 4.)

- Use of streaming text below footage informing the viewer that the footage had been viewed by “Israeli military censors.” No similar indication of the role of Palestinian “authorities” in controlling the images emanating from areas under their control ever appeared. For a discussion of the press’s differential treatment of formal Israeli military censorship and informal but pervasive Palestinian censorship via intimidation and violence, (see pp. 353-387).

- Reluctance of the press – especially the “resident” reporters to reveal the extent of PLO brutality in the “state within a state” in southern Lebanon (see pp 219-278).

Given the eagerness of the Western press to report the worst of the Israelis, to avoid reporting on the worst of the Palestinians, their susceptibility to intimidation and the murder of journalists who displeased the PLO, and their remarkably shoddy standards in sifting real from confected evidence, Palestinians clearly understood that they had a valuable ally in the Western media based at the Commodore Hotel – “Chairman Yasser’s Best Battalion” (Chafets, Double Vision, chap. 6).

Poisoning of Palestinian Schoolgirls, Jenin (West Bank), March, 1983

A year after the Lebanese media debacle, Israel found itself the object of an extensive, premeditated fraud in which a number of Palestinian girls at middle school claimed to have been poisoned by “the Israelis.” The story immediately became an international scandal, with each nation reporting such a variety of details that the tale ended up resembling a version of Rashoman. None, however, questioned the veracity of the reports of poisoning, nor of the accusations of Israeli guilt. Only after a lengthy investigation did it turn out that there were no girls poisoned, and that PLO operatives had encouraged and bullied the girls and the hospital officials into cooperating.

The most interesting element of the story from the perspective of the media coverage reveals the following breakdown:

- The Israeli press took the accusations seriously and only after a medical investigation did they conclude that these were false.

- The Palestinian and Arab press immediately assumed they were true and used them to incite hatred and fear of Israelis. No amount of counter-evidence brought a change in coverage.

- The Western press presented the accusations as probable if not true (Europeans far more aggressive than Americans), and when the evidence of staging emerged, ceased to cover the incident, leaving the Israelis between libel and silence.

The accusations of Poison constitute the first clear-cut case of Pallywood: atrocities staged by Palestinian activists, depicting the Israelis poisoning innocent Palestinians, done for the sake of – and embraced by – both local and foreign press.

The First Intifada, 1987-91?

During the first Intifada, the media turned the West Bank into a feeding frenzy of Israeli brutality against what was often characterized as non-violent resistance. Here for the first time, we find an open collaboration between cameramen who were either informed of the imminent occurrence of, or had paid for, action sequences that they could photograph.

Staggering from the negative press, and uncertain as to how to quell the violence, Israeli authorities sometimes closed the territories to foreign press. These latter often supped drinks at the American Colony Hotel in East Jerusalem while they gave cameras to Palestinian stringers to bring them action footage. This probably marks the first time that Palestinians with Western equipment were able to feed the news agencies images that they and the “street” staged. For an interesting analysis of the media’s handling of the first Intifada and the ways in which, focused on a particular story line (the Israeli Goliath vs. the Palestinian David), see Jim Lederman, Battle Lines.

There has also been in recent times an increasing number of web/newspaper articles that have described and denounced the manipulation of the media by Palestinians, and the anti-Israel bias of many in the western media.

- Recently a Palestinian filmmaker, producer of “Jenin, Jenin” admitted falsifying scenes in order to make Israelis look bad.

- Jeff Helmreich has documented a pattern of violation of professional journalism codes that dominate the reporting of Israel and the Palestinians.

- In an interview media analyst David Bedein has argued that for the past twenty years, the Palestinians have outmaneuvered the Israelis in framing the conflict for the world media.

- Josh Muravchik denounced the lousy job of the Western media covering the intifada and denounced the mechanical even handedness in reporting the conflict that gives the upper hand to authoritarian societies.

- Stephanie Gutmann, in “The Other War: Israelis, Palestinians and the Struggle for Media supremacy” argues that Israel has floundered on the battlefield of editorial pages, television screens and the Internet.

The second “Al Aqsa” Intifada, October 2000-2004?

The outbreak of the second round of Palestinian violence against Israel came, ironically, in the wake of peace negotiations in which, according to the most credible sources, the Israelis offered the vast majority of the West Bank and all of the Gaza Strip (including the evacuation of settlements) in exchange for an end to the war between the Israelis and the Arabs. For a brief moment Barak and the Israelis actually got some sympathy in the world arena, and Arafat was weathering a rare period of disapproval from the world community. But once the violence broke out, and Israel could be blamed, and especially once pictures of Muhamed al Durah showed on TVs around the world, opinion shifted dramatically and decisively.

Perhaps the best way to understand how Pallywood was able to have such success at this juncture is to examine what happened on September 29, the day after Sharon visited the Temple Mount/Haram al Sharif. That day, news agencies reported violent clashes between Israeli troops and Palestinians enraged by Sharon’s visit. AP published a photograph of a young man, bloodied and kneeling in front of an angry Israeli brandishing a baton.

Now it doesn’t take an insider to know that something is wrong here. There are no gas stations anywhere near the Temple Mount, so the location is clearly mistaken. But the mistakes far exceed mere location, and a closer look suggests that the Israeli soldier seems to be yelling at people beyond the wounded man. The man wounded in the picture is not a Palestinian, but an American Jew, a seminary student, who was dragged from his car by an angry mob of Palestinians and almost beaten and stabbed to death. (It took him months in the hospital to recover.) Read Tuvya Grossman’s personal account here. The Israeli is then not beating the boy, but protecting him from the mob, which is the object of his anger and attention. Among other papers, the New York Times, without checking any of these facts, ran the picture with the caption.

Nothing illustrates better the problem of paradigmatic expectations influencing what we see and how we register it. The Palestinians are the victims, the Israelis the victimizers. The picture illustrates JP: aggressive Palestinians initiating violence against civilians in Israel, and Israeli restraint (the soldier does not even use a gun to chase the murderous crowd). The caption re-reads the photo so it accords with PCP: aggressive Israelis viciously attacking unarmed Palestinian demonstrators on the third holiest site in Islam.

It took the NYT 4 days to acknowledge the error identifying the victim as “Tuvya Grossman of Chicago” and a week to do a story on the beating. But by then the damage had been done. Not only was the PCP firmly set in place, but also the picture had become an emblem of Palestinian victimization. Despite this subsequent retraction, therefore, as in the case of the poison accusations of 1983, Palestinian and Arab media and their PCP2 supporters have continued to use the picture as part of their Palestinian victim narrative. To this day, Tuvya Grossman’s picture adorns a poster calling on everyone in the world to boycott Coca Cola in order to stop Israelis from killing Palestinians like this man.

With such a powerful storyline affecting (and transforming) the very nature of the evidence that our MSM presented to us at the outbreak of the violence in the Fall of 2000, is it surprising that the following day, they responded so eagerly to yet another piece of evidence that supported their PCP grand narrative – the case of Muhamed al Durah?

IS THERE AN ISRAELI EQUIVALENT TO PALLYWOOD?

“Don’t the Israelis also do fictional news?”

Every country’s media spins the news in its defense, and plays with a margin of judgment in what it may present to the public.

There are analysts who argue that Israel is far superior in manipulating the media:

- Delinda C. Hanley, News Editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, argues that Israeli spin-doctors have been successful in portraying in the American media the victims (the Palestinians) as the aggressors in the conflict.

- Alison Weir, founder of If Americans Knew argues that the Western media, particularly American, have been consistently pro-Israeli in their coverage of the conflict. She calls it a “pervasive pattern of distortion.”

- Daniel Dor, from Tel Aviv university, in “Intifada Hits the Headlines,” (2004) argues that the Israeli press has aligned itself with the propaganda coming from the Israeli establishment. To him, in times of conflict the press in liberal democracies plays a “role not totally dissimilar to that of the press in non-democracies.” (Page 168) For a brief excerpt of his book read here.

But the differences here are so large as to demand particular attention to this issue:

- The Israelis do not fake images of injury; on the contrary, deep taboos prevent the Israeli press from showing pictures of dead bodies.

- Nor do the Israelis constantly show images designed to arouse hatred, unlike Palestinians. Compare the coverage given in Israel to the stunning footage from the Ramallah lynching of Oct. 12, 2000 with the constant repetition on TV and in the school curriculum of the footage and of reenactments of the Muhamed A Durah affair two weeks earlier.

- The Israeli press constitutes one of the most self-critical presses in the world. Mistakes rarely pass undetected and undenounced. When the IDF accused the UN of using their ambulances to move Kassam rockets and the evidence failed to provide proof, the Israeli press denounced the mistake sharply: “Israel behaved with reckless haste and injured its pretensions to superiority over the Palestinians with regard to credibility.”

There is no equivalent in the Palestinian – or Arab – press of Gideon Levy and Amirah Hass, journalists for Ha-Aretz. This element of self-criticism is, for the most part, absent in the Arab media. For an enlightening example, read here and here.

- Even organizations denounced by the other side as “propaganda” sites, like Palestinian Media Watch and MEMRI, are scrupulously honest in the material they post from the Arab world, in their translations, even careful not only to post the negative comments in the Arab press, but also the positive ones.

- To make the facile, “even-handed” comparison misses a major distinction between the rough and tumble criticisms of a free press in Israel and the intimidation and high propaganda content of the press in Arab authoritarian societies. If one cannot understand these differences, one cannot understand the value and importance of self-critical free press sustaining civil society. Tolerance for criticism and for variant viewpoints marks the commitment to civil society.

WHY IS IT IMPORTANT TO DENOUNCE PALLYWOOD?

- Pallywood distorts Western and Middle Eastern public opinion.

- Aggravates the narrative victim/victimizer, dominant in both Western and Middle East Media, that prolongs the conflict

- Perpetuates the David (Palestinians) Vs Goliath (Israel) narrative.

- Contributes to the demonization of Israel/rise of anti-Semitism

- An accurate and fair MSM are crucial for a healthy civil society.

- By its sheer drama Pallywood leads to Western romantization of the Palestinian struggle and justification of the most atrocious methods to achieve their aims.

“They’re beautiful, highly trained and deadly. They are the female suicide bombers.” Australia’s New Idea magazine, April 7, 2003.

This is a good point by Crafty: "When there are no Jews to hate, then the next handy non-Muslim target will do just fine, see e.g. what is happening to the Coptic Christians right now in Egypt." And if there was no Israel, the target becomes Europe and the USA. You don't have to be Jewish or Israeli when you know the term infidel simply means not one of them. The context of the wall is also an important point, as is the point that the hiding of military inside of civilian locations for photo drama is a particularly cruel strategy.

Saddam used to call his enemy "the Zionists and the Imperialists", ** but he wasn't attacked and pushed back from Kuwait by Israel, and the Americans weren't there to take land, they were there to help other Arab-Muslims take back their land and to contain his own imperialism. When the anti-Iraq war crowd claimed that Saddam had no ties to terrorism, they didn't count direct financial support for suicide bombing of Jews in Israel as terrorism, because... attacks against Jews in Israel don't constitute terrorism??

(** I asked previously if someone could come up with the actual Saddam surrender statement of 1991. The 'Zionists' are mentioned often in it. GM came back with something else, but I thought maybe Andrew as a historian might be able to help to re-locate that document.)

I have a friend of years past with views similar to what I read in Andrew's view. I didn't view the videos, but this friend maintained that the Israeli Defense forces are the meanest SOBs on the planet. In the context that the entire region supports their destruction and Israel is still standing, that accusation doesn't seem misplaced. Then he would point out examples of Israel responding disproportionately to the attacks against them. I don't find that to be out of place either. The point is to stop the attacks. I don't know of any additional lands or anything else Israel's neighbors have that Israel wants, just that the attacks against them would cease.

The only terms of a possible peace settlement come down to what Netanyahu spelled out. Besides life, all Israel wants is defensible borders.

These are all words I read and hear all the time in the media. Usually the type of media that wants to divert the attention to something else, and creating an elevated state of panic. This point and curse maneuvre seems to have some universaility to it. Shock and awe, hell yeah.

You speak of Academia like its a coherent whole, „us against the world“ type of an institution, that holds its own in a sea of predators. Well here is some first hand insight : even at hardline scientific cathedras, you would be hard pressed to find phds that agree on something. Viscious competition and backstabbing is common just as it is common in management or sports.

These delusions you have about a leftist communist hidden agenda rising from the bowels of the academia and eating up what good is left, is a hardcore anachronism. One that kindly shows your age. This left-right, us-them, red-blue dichotomy portrayed here, is long gone in university circles and otherwise. Dont overjudge the thinkers circuit. Dont fall in the same old trap, when discussing theory. Know the place of theory and know the pople whos job it is to study it. It is its role to be brutally to the point, agressive, unorthodox and radical. It is intentionally contraveresed, and split from practice. Academia, coming from the ancient greek Akademeia, is supposed to be, what it literally means, the cultural accumulation of knowledge, its development and transmission across generations and its practitioners and transmitters. What you do with the gained knowledge, is another thing.

But the spectres of communism still haunt old cellars I see. Here I am afraid, I will just have to let it go, as your ways may just be too ingrained to accept anything else.

I love it how you write about postmodernism and marxism like they have anything to do with todays left.Or how you brace them aside like noones business. Ironically, it was a neocon pioneer who skyrocketed the idea of post-modernism (which as an idea, is about 150 years old, the father being no other than G.W Hegel) into the scope of the world, his name was Francis Fukuyama.

Dont act like you have seen the light. You are no different to any other leftist or rightist or whatever you want to call it, who reads a book or two, and thinks everyone else is stupid and blind. Dont be so naive. It used to be enough to be an ideologically biased, info stuffed hardliner. Not anymore. Nowadays, if you want to get heard, you need to read everything, fullstop.

If there is a lecture to be had from todays time and age, if there is a lecture to be had from post-modern crisis of human thought, its that today there is no one true light that illuminates the blind anymore. There are only different stories. Only shades.

But I presume to understand, you were coming up in a time where stories were taken literally and the light was still one and true (for both sides).

I hate to be an old trumpet, and hate it even more to disprove this dubious attempt yet again, but necessity prevails. GM makes things sound so simple. Now its my sacred duty to complicate them and carve the way forth for truth, so it may never rest buried under piles of rubble.

Lovely article. Very nice rhetoric used, again. Weiner is such a gentleman.

Be especially mindful of the reply an Egyptian jew whom Weiner had interviewed, named Andre Sharon sent to Weiner himself, and the Times editorial, after the published article. Cannot quote in full, too long.

Said had been a fellow student but that because St George's was closed for two years after l948, Said had graduated from Victoria school in Cairo. Boyadjian emphasizes to CounterPunch that he most explicitly told Weiner that Said had been a fellow student, and that he finds it "unbelievable" that Weiner should have suppressed their conversation in his Commentary article, adding that "people like Weiner have an agenda but no principles".

….we talked to Michael Marmoura, now emeritus professor at the University of Toronto, who well remembers teaching Said at St. Georges, saying he was ''a bit of a rascal, very naughty,'' and whose father baptized the infant Said in an Anglican church in Jerusalem. Yes indeed, Marmoura says, the Saids were well-known as an old Palestinian family. http://www.salon.com/books/log/1999/09/10/weiner/

Charles Lane, editor of the New Republic, confirms rumors that his magazine was offered Weiner's essay before Commentary. Lane says that Weiner had refused to "look at the galley of Said's memoir and take it into account. Discussions broke off at that point." Weiner then brought the story to Commentary. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/1999/aug/23/israel

Israel Shahak - who is a Holocaust survivor and an Israeli human rights activist - said: "Commentary is a monthly of the most rightwing Jewish views, and the most conservative views in America, so I am not surprised by this attack."Mr Shahak said that the argument over how the Said family left did not affect Prof Said's status as a refugee. "This is like saying the Jews who escaped from Germany before the war were not kicked out," Mr Shahak argued. "The main argument is that they were prevented from returning to their land. This is what it is about."

The only problem with the current hullabaloo, at the outset, is that during his three years of assiduous research Weiner never once contacted or in any way spoke to me, an extraordinary omission by a man who pretends that he is both a scholar and a journalist but actually uses the methods of neither one nor the other. Another fact about his method is that he did not properly consult my memoir, Out of Place, completed in September 1998, and to appear next month.

I have never claimed to have been made a refugee, but rather that my extended family, all of it -- uncles, cousins, aunts, grandparents -- in fact was.

By the spring of 1948, not a single relative of mine was left in Palestine, ethnically cleansed by Zionist forces. Commentary's Weiner does not mention that, allowing himself the preposterous claim that my memoir (begun in 1994 and completed in 1998) was written to refute him in 1999.

Weiner says that we didn't try for reparations, thereby deliberately obfuscating two facts: that my father did in fact try to sue the Israeli government for reparations and, second, that by l950 the law of absentee property passed by Israel had converted all Palestinian property into Israeli property, illegally of course. No wonder our efforts were unrewarded. He says that I didn't attend St George's School. This is an outright lie. He does not admit that the school's records end in l946 and I was there in 1947, or that my father and cousins had attended the school starting in 1906. Had he been a decent researcher, he might have sought out one of my classmates

In the body of his article, he does not name the people he allegedly talked to "on four continents" or the documents he consulted, what exactly they said, or when, and in answer to what question.

If someone like Edward Said is a liar, runs the argument, how can we believe all those peasants who say they were driven off their land? The Likud argument (Weiner's) is that the land all belongs to the people of Israel, since it was given to them by God. All the other claimants are therefore prevaricators and pretenders.

Luckily, several survivors of 1948 from my family are still alive and well. My oldest cousin, the last person to leave our Talbiyeh house, is 80 years old now and lives in Toronto. Why was he not contacted? As my widowed aunt's oldest son, he negotiated with Martin Buber and took him to court when he refused to leave the house after his lease was up and our family returned from a year in Cairo. What about our neighbours, other relatives, friends, members of the church community? They were never contacted. Several children of the pastor who baptised me are still alive also: they could have been contacted. No: what Commentary wants is not the truth but the Big Zionist Lie

And of course, the elegant finish, proving only what JDN already said about Said (pun intended) and why the Annales will know the bigger man.

I have always advocated the acknowledgement by each other of the Palestinian and Jewish peoples' past sufferings. Only in this way can they coexist peacefully in the future. Weiner is more interested in using the past -- either an individual or collective past -- to prevent understanding and reconciliation.It is a pity that so much time and venom as he has expended couldn't have been used for positive purposes.

You prove time and again you havent actually read a WORD from Said himself. God forbid reading something and expanding your arsenal and getting a glimpse of something different. Only the dubious attacks on his crediblity from an interview. Burn the heretic.

He did however learn, like Said and Ward Churchill that as long as you fabricate a narrative that pleases the leftist paradigm in academia, you can coast along on that alone with all the rewards the system can confiscate from those that actually do tangible work.

Said hasnt pleased anyone in the "academia". If anything he was a radical loose cannon and a controversial persona, causing uproar everywhere he went and with anything he has written.You speak so foul of the academia like its supposed to be gulity of something, but you havent a slightest clue as to what it is and what it does. And here a 25 something year old European has to tell you about it. Its precicesly THIS FACT alone, that someone like Said got a permanent seat at Columbia, which truly shows that America still is one of the greatest countries in the world to live in.

That it still cherishes and nurtures radical views, para-doxa intellectual insight and isnt afraid of challenging thoughts, shows and tells me everything I need to know.

They value knowledge, new ideas and openminded spirit. This is the true gem of America, for me. Not some opportunistic, free, economical safeheaven mumbo jumbo. Why do you think most of the elite, influential thinkers in America arent American at all ? Because they can excell there, and nowhere else.

In Europe, with all its pompous noise and noble stance, a black president, sadly, cannot happen yet. That alone, should make you feel proud to be American.

@Crafty

I agree with your doubts about the intent of the media. The vids may very well be staged. Apart from the few ones, where IDF soldiers shoot tied civilians point blank range, with high ranking officers present. Even that, I guess, we could put up for scrutiny. But then again, how do we know that Fatah vs Hamas tragedy from the vid Kostas posted really is what you are saying ?

@Doug

I havent forgotten about your idea of the Saddam surrender statement, mate. The actual document would be next to impossible to find I think, since if indeed it does exist it should be located in the Iraqi national archives in Baghdad.If they still stand. Or maybe in America somewhere. Ill ask around a bit.

Keep in mind though, I am not speaking my personal stance here, I have attenuated this several times. I just hate it when information is presented one dimensionally, forfeit and out of context. This is the sole reason of all my posts on this forum.

"@Doug I havent forgotten about your idea of the Saddam surrender statement, mate. The actual document would be next to impossible to find I think, since if indeed it does exist it should be located in the Iraqi national archives in Baghdad.If they still stand. Or maybe in America somewhere. Ill ask around a bit."-----Thanks. I just mean a copy - an English translation. I had it in my hand at the time from one of the online services of 1991 and saved it - who knows where. Nothing earthshaking in it, just a glimpse into his mind and his propaganda. The detachment from reality was startling to me. Four pages of flowery BS as I recall, congratulating Iraqis all the way through for their victory over the Zionists and the Imperialists, victory because they stayed proud, victory because they proved this and proved that. At the very end he accepts UN resolutions xxx... Nothing close to the word surrender is hinted.

1) "You speak of Academia like its a coherent whole, „us against the world“ type of an institution, that holds its own in a sea of predators. Well here is some first hand insight : even at hardline scientific cathedras, you would be hard pressed to find phds that agree on something. Viscious competition and backstabbing is common just as it is common in management or sports."

I am reminded of Harvard Prof, Nixon cabinet member, and later US Senator from NY, Daniel Moynihan who commented that Washington politics was child's play to that at Harvard -- working from memory here-- "precisely because so little of import was at stake".

That said, IMHO it is a simple fact that US academia is overwhelmingly leftist and much of it is dedicated to propagation of leftist ideology and not a search for the Truth.

2) Concerning the description of the video that Kostas posted at my request, I regret my lack of citations, but I do remember receiving it from various places and with considerable certainty I regard my description of it to be quite true.

3) "where IDF soldiers shoot tied civilians point blank range, with high ranking officers present." Working from memory here again because I am too lazy to go surf through all those videos to double check, but IIRC the shooting was in the leg with a rubber bullet-- in which case your description here leaves a very misleading impression.

" if there is a lecture to be had from post-modern crisis of human thought, its that today there is no one true light that illuminates the blind anymore. There are only different stories. Only shades. But I presume to understand, you were coming up in a time where stories were taken literally and the light was still one and true (for both sides). I hate to be an old trumpet, and hate it even more to disprove this dubious attempt yet again, but necessity prevails. GM makes things sound so simple. Now its my sacred duty to complicate them and carve the way forth for truth, so it may never rest buried under piles of rubble."

As I think you already know about me Andraz, I fully get the point about shades and different stories, that we are all blind men grasping a different part of the elephant and so forth. That said, IMHO you seem to go substantively further to a dimension where there is no true and false, no right and wrong. Posting clips which you admit "very well may have been staged" does not serve to free Truth from under piles of rubble; rather it ADDS rubble and hides it amongst the smoke of obfuscation-- which serves to cause of those who seek to push the Jews into the sea.

This is the sort of thing that leads to very bright, very well educated academics (i.e. you ) speaking such foolishness as Israel "surrounding the Palestinians" and unwilling to notice the clear simple implications of Muslim treatment of the Coptics in Egypt for the nature of Islam in this part of the world. As Rachel's clip nicely shows, it is the Jews of Israel who have Jerusalem open to all. It was (and is) the Muslims who seek to deny the history of the Jews there. Even today they burrow under their mosque seeking to remove the physical evidence that our temple was there before their mosque.

This is the sort of thing that leads to an inability to see that the underlying fundamental problem is not the Jews, it is that the other side contains percentages of those who seek to remove us altogether.

I've tried to get a better handle on when Abraham lived. When one looks up his name one gets around 1100 BC.As per below, "Contemporary archaeologists have given up the attempt to find a historical reality behind the Patriarchs as individuals, and it is now generally accepted that "it is not possible to demonstrate the historical existence of the figures in Genesis."[4]":

***Wikepedia on the Patriarchs:Patriarchal ageThe Patriarchal Age is the era of the three biblical Patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, according to the narratives of Genesis 12-50. (These chapters also contain the history of Joseph, although Joseph is not one of the Covenantal Patriarchs).

The bible contains an intricate pattern of chronologies from the creation of Adam, the first man, to the reigns of the later kings of ancient Israel and Judah, at which point the bible makes contact with known and dateable history. From these it is possible to calculate (strictly within a biblical frame of reference) that the birth of Abraham, the first of the Patriarchs, 1,948 years after the Creation, corresponded to 1812 BC.[1]

Prior to the 19th century there was little interest in questioning the biblical chronology, but with the growth of biblical criticism and the wide popularity of the documentary hypothesis - the theory that the Pentateuch, including the Book of Genesis, was composed not by Moses but by unknown authors living at various times between 950 and 450 BC - it became increasingly urgent both to supporters of the traditional view (i.e., that Genesis was an accurate historical record written by Moses under the direct guidance of God) and the new (the documentary hypothesis) to find concrete arguments to support their respective views. Thus was born biblical archaeology, a form of archaeology different from all others in that it sought, not to discover and interpret mute evidence, but to validate (or for some, invalidate) a written book.

The most eminent of early biblical archaeologists was William F. Albright, who believed that he had identified the Patriarchal age in the period 2100-1800 BC, the Intermediate Bronze Age, the interval between two periods of highly developed urban culture in ancient Canaan. Albright argued that he had found evidence of the sudden collapse of the previous Early Bronze Age culture, and ascribed this to the invasion of migratory pastoral nomads from the northeast whom he identified with the Amorites mentioned in Mesopotamian texts. According to Albright, Abraham was a wandering Amorite who migrated from the north into the central highlands of Canaan and the Negev with his flocks and followers as the Canaanite city-states collapsed. Albright, E. A. Speiser and Cyrus Gordon argued that although the texts described by the documentary hypothesis were written centuries after the Patriarchal age, archaeology had shown that they were nevertheless an accurate reflection of the conditions of the 2nd millennium BC: "We can assert with full confidence that Abraham, Isaac and Jacob were actual historical individuals."[2]

But in the last quarter of the 20th century Albright's interpretation became increasingly untenable. Archaeology, far from reinforcing the reliability of Genesis, has demonstrated that it is rife with anachronisms. For example, the Philistines whom Abraham encounters did not settle in the Middle East until the 12th century BC, camels were not in general use as beasts of burden until the 7th century BC, and the genealogies of the Patriarchs and the nations supposedly derived from them represent "a colorful human map of the ancient Near East from the unmistakable viewpoint of the kingdom of Israel and the kingdom of Judah in the eighth and seventh centuries BC".[3] Contemporary archaeologists have given up the attempt to find a historical reality behind the Patriarchs as individuals, and it is now generally accepted that "it is not possible to demonstrate the historical existence of the figures in Genesis."[4]

[edit] References^ The situation is not quite so clear-cut as this implies, as there are variant manuscripts of the bible giving variant chronologies, differing by thousands of years: the description given here is from the Masoretic text, the basis of most modern English translations. ^ John Bright, "History of Israel", 1972, p.91.) ^ Sarah Belle Dougherty, Fiat Lux: Archeology and the Old Testament (review of Finkelstein and Silberman, "The Bible Unearthed", 2003). ^ See review of Terrance Fretheim, "The New Interpreter's Bible", 1994. Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriarchal_age"Categories: Jewish history***

The secretary to the late Lt. Colonel Jerry Killian told the Dallas Morning News that the memos touted by CBS in its effort to discredit President Bush are forgeries, but since she decided their content matched the thoughts expressed by Killian, 60 Minutes showcased her Wednesday night, thus setting a new journalistic standard: Use phoney evidence to smoke out support for your otherwise uncorroborated theory. Dan Rather trumpeted how the 86-year-old Marian Carr Knox "flew to New York this afternoon to tell us she believes the documents we obtained are not authentic. But there's yet another confusing twist to this story. She told us she believes what the documents actually say is exactly as we reported."

That's not a "confusing twist." That's a clear rejection of the basis of CBS's sleazy reporting.

Rather highlighted how she addressed a reference in one of CBS's forged memos "to retired General Staudt pushing for a positive officer training report on Lieutenant Bush. 'And Staudt is pushing to sugar coat it.' Does that sound like Colonel Killian? Is that the way he felt?" Knox, sitting in a chair facing Rather, affirmed: "That's absolutely the way he felt about that." Rather emphasized that in the case of another memo, "she doesn't believe the memo is authentic, but she says the facts behind it are very real."

Ward Churchill played the same con game as Fast Eddie Said. Create a bogus identity that makes you a hot prospect in academia and no one will question your credentials and lack of actual scholarship because they want to BELIEVE.

Dr., Native American, original artist, serious scholar, combat veteran, highly recruited and sought-after academic, ex-Weatherman mentor: How many — if any — of these seven faces of our real-life Dr. Lao are true?

Professors outside the arts at major research universities are supposed to have Ph.D.s. The phantom Ward Churchill does not. How he was hired, promoted, and tenured without a doctorate is a mystery — the equivalent of a high-school teacher credentialed with an AA degree, or a medical doctor operating without an M.D.

Ward Churchill proclaimed that he is a Native American of various tribal affiliations; he is not. Even his ridiculous costumes, occasional threats, and puerile rants cannot disguise that fact.

He seems to be a pop artist of sorts, but his canvasses are not quite his own either. Those of like political mind have praised his scholarship, but much of what he writes seems derivative, or misrepresents or outright plagiarizes others.

Churchill has spoken of the firsthand trauma of battle service as a combat veteran, both as a paratrooper and as a sniper — among the most hazardous of corps in the United States military. Once again, there is no such evidence that he served in any capacity other than what his official duties in a motor pool and as a projectionist entailed.

Embarrassed officials claim Churchill was sought after by other universities — so they had to reel in this trophy catch before he got away — but no one can find any proof other than Churchill’s own mendacious claims.

No one knows what to make of his various arrests, boasts of bomb-making, trip to Libya, angry and traumatized ex-wives, braggadocio about petty vandalism, tales of phone threats, and the variety of other sordid stories that surround this fabricated man. Churchill’s presence on campus is like the weaving driver who is pulled over by the state police, who quickly find no license, registration, or insurance, but plenty of warrants — and thus wonder how many other paroled miscreants they’ve missed out there, one accident away from being a public-relations nightmare.

So, again, does this Ward Churchill even exist?

Of course not: His faces are made up of whole cloth.

Yet instead of seeing Churchill as no man, it is better to envision him as an academic everyman. In the alternate universe of the modern campus, any collective imbalance of wealth, education, health, happiness, or almost anything is explicable only in terms of deliberate present discrimination and systematic past oppression.

Any other exegesis — cultural attitudes, individual preferences, bad personal choices and behaviors, time off for child-rearing, bad luck — is irrelevant. Indeed, to raise them is prima facie evidence of one’s own discrimination, intolerance, and racism, and can lead to the academic guillotine. Ask Harvard president Larry Summers.

Instead, equality of result is to be mandated by a government that in turn is to be instructed on how to do so by the university. Its cadres of subsidized social scientists and humanists provide both the rigged diagnosis and the lucrative therapy. Thus, to succeed on campus without a degree or talent or much of anything, it is absolutely critical to be an ideologue of the first order.

Churchill’s rantings are full of leftist hyperbole, vicious Nazi allusions, and calls for violence against the United States (“more 9/11s are necessary”) and an end to America itself (“There’s no U.S. in America anymore”). Should Churchill have been such a vicious court jester of the Right and slurred gays and minorities as he did the victims of mass murder, he would have been fired long ago.

Rule 1: Profess to be as far left as possible, understanding that extremism in the service of utopian virtue is no vice.

Most academics are retiring sorts. They enjoy the tranquility of the campus and its isolation from the conundrum of society at large. But like peaceful sheep grazing in green pastures, they are easy prey for rapacious wolves. Professors are especially vulnerable to a bully and showman like Churchill, whose record of both oral and written intimidation leaves most disturbed, frightened, or at least convinced to steer clear of this loose loud popgun when he goes off.

Note then his evocation of past bomb-making, his photo-ops in fatigues with obligatory machine gun, and his occasional brushes with the law.

Rule 2: Among the nerds and dorks, act a little like a Brando, Che, or James Dean, a wild spirit that gives off a spark of danger, who can at a distance titillate Walter Mitty-like admirers and closer up scare off the more sober censors.

Victimization is essential to academic man. Under the warped tenets into which affirmative action has devolved and the existing protocols of the blame industry, at first glance this put a pink heterosexual American male like Churchill in a seemingly tough bind. What cover or exemption, after all, is there when his scholarship, teaching, or academic citizenship is found wanting?

That dilemma Churchill solved brilliantly when he endowed himself with two new unimpeachable personas: the noble but victimized Native American, and the half-noble but nevertheless traumatized Vietnam veteran.

Both costumes were eerie in their cleverness: In Colorado, with its Western heritage and abundance of Native Americans, the frontier past is especially touchy and ripe for exploitation. And while it is harder for a pale white man to simply declare himself one day black or Hispanic, fraudulently identifying oneself as a quarter, eighth, or sixteenth American Indian has been a roguish American pastime since the onset of affirmative action. Even before that, 1950s Hollywood showed how quite a lot of white people like Ward Churchill can indeed pass as Indians, if they grow their hair long, get a beaded headband, and put on some tassels and buckskins. But instead of the 1950s Kemosabe lingo, by 2005, the script had evolved to add shades and scream about massacres, genocide, and getting even.

If Malibu and Burbank actors playing braves and chiefs once taught suburban Americans how to reinvent themselves as Nez Perce warriors, so too Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now, and Rambo reinvented the Vietnam veteran as the misunderstood anti-hero. Under the changed protocols, the once-slurred “war criminal” of the 1960s was in the ‘70s and ‘80s reinvented as a sympathetic “victim” who was “used” by the military-industrial complex.

Indeed, the only other persona more faked by American con artists than the Native American is the tortured Vietnam War combat veteran — especially on the campus, where military service is rare and first-hand revelations of its horror are at a premium, lending a hard masculine edge felt to be sometimes lacking in the world of Volvo fender-benders, elbow-patched tweed, and seminar droning.

In short, Churchill’s Indian and Vietnam-veteran pseudo-affiliations — replete with long hair, camouflage, and sunglasses getup — were worth at least a Ph.D. from Harvard.

The short resurrected career of Bill Ayers, the former 1960s terrorist, showed how nostalgic the tenured class is for the barricades of the 1960s. The only thing that cut short Ayers’s glitzy book tour in autumn 2001 was the catastrophe of 9/11. That coincidence unfortunately reminded even the most diehard SDS fans that terrorist killers and bombers are hardly idealists but rather repulsive thugs and two-bit murderers.

Although most American males at the plant and office nearing their 60s are thinking of grandchildren, Social Security, paying off the mortgage, and Vioxx and Viagra, a post-menopausal Churchill sensed the romanticism of the 1960s that lingered among his colleagues and the mystery the period connoted for a new generation of upscale, rite-of-passage college students.

Recalcitrant, unbending, immobile, a throw-back to a better, more idealistic age — this is the rock-cut image that the perpetual ‘60s professor taps into. And Churchill, with his photo-studio manufactured profile, pageboy locks, occasional fake Indian name, hip street lingo, and sassy banter did it better than any we’ve seen in quite a while — or at least well enough to wow the flabby university committees that allowed him to cash in.

Rule 4. Don’t worry about the anti-capitalist’s embarrassing six-figure salary, plush job, lifelong guaranteed employment, and fondness for jet travel and hotels. Just keep acting like an ageless denizen of the Woodstock nation, professing to be a timeless dagger pointed at the heart of money-grubbing square America.

So who really is this strange creature who calls himself Keezjunnahbeh? The Paris Hilton of the campus, a Peter Sellers-like fraud in his own Being There, or a Tony Randall turning into all sorts of strange beasts in Dr. Lao’s circus? He is nobody in fact, but also everybody in theory.

Perhaps it is best to think of Churchill as our aging portrait of an academic Dorian Gray, in whom all the once-hallowed university’s vices and sins of the last half-century are now so deeply etched and lined.

— Victor Davis Hanson is a military historian and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. His website is victorhanson.com.

Did you know that the Chmielnicki pogroms of the 17th century that killed so many Jews were really very "progressive" events ? No, you didn't know that ? Well, Edward Said knows.

And did you know that the Talmud teaches hatred toward Gentiles ? Edward Said knows.

Did you know that Jewish children are taught to utter a ritual curse when passing a non-Jewish cemetery? Edward Said knows.

Or that when orthodox Jews wash two hands, one is to worship Satan ? Or that Orthodox Jews frequently kill those with whom they disagree, for instance liberal rabbis ? Or that the Jews, spurred on by their religious traditions, oppress and kill the Palestinians ? You didn't even know THAT ? Well, Edward Said knows all this, and more. The Arab-American professor of literature at Columbia University not only knows all these things but he also wishes to share them with you.

The outlandish assertions that I have listed, and many more that are even more preposterous, are contained in a scurrilous little anti-Semitic pamphlet by one Israel Shahak, entitled "Jewish Religion, Jewish History." The French edition of Shahak was published in 1996 by La Vieille Taupe, a neo-Nazi sect in Paris that publishes books denying the Holocaust. And the French edition (but not the English) contains a remarkable eight-page introductory essay ("avant propos") by Edward Said.

Shahak is an eccentric Israeli chemist who, aged fifty-three in 1988, retired to devote himself full time to plagiarizing Nazi and other anti-Semitic writers. I had occasion to review his "Jewish History" when it appeared in English. This English edition (but not the French) bore an urgent recommendation by Noam Chomsky ("Shahak is an outstanding scholar, with remarkable insight and depth of knowledge. His work is informed and penetrating, a contribution of great value"). Gore Vidal, outdoing both Said and Chomsky, contributed his Foreword to both editions.

Said's essay in praise of Shahak, in the French edition, runs into a little problem. While the Holocaust never happened as far as La Vieille Taupe is concerned, Said has on more than one occasion spoken out against Holocaust-denying in the Arab world. So what to do when Said mentions, in passing, that Shahak is a survivor of the Holocaust ? La Vieille Taupe inserts a little footnote there, showing that Said is mistaken on this point (p. 12).

But for the rest, Said is right on board. He praises Shahak for the latter's felicity in describing Israel as "Judeo-Nazi" (p. 11). He appreciates Shahak's criticism of Arafat whenever Arafat showed himself conciliatory toward Israel (p. 13). And Said also approves of Shahak's opposition to Peace Now, since Peace Now, according to Said, is "shameful" in demanding peaceful actions from Palestinians (pp. 13-4). In short, Said finds in Shahak a kindred spirit in demanding, in effect, the complete dismantlement of Israel.

But these political points are completely overshadowed by what can only be considered the bad faith of Edward Said when he praises Shahak's "scholarship." Said says that Shahak is the greatest scholar he has ever known ("le plus grand érudit que j'aie jamais connu" -- p. 15). The book at hand, says Said, is a powerful study of Judaism, of its rabbinic and Talmudic traditions: "It is nothing less than a concise history of classic and modern Judaism insofar as these are relevant to the understanding of modern Israel" (p. 16).

So we see that Said of Columbia is at one with Chomsky of MIT : endorsing "scholarship" in fields in which he is not expert, in this case the "scholarship" of a shoddy, disreputable propaganda tract. It seems that two of the most distinguished American universities cannot guarantee the moral or indeed the intellectual integrity of what goes on within their walls.

Finally, it is an interesting fact that Said's praise of Shahak and his "scholarship" is effectively hidden from the public. It is not mentioned in the comprehensive bibliography of Said's writings, nor is Said's name mentioned in La Vieille Taupe's own on-line catalog. The book cannot be bought from the American or French amazon.com, it is not listed in the Library of Congress catalog nor in other standard catalogs that are available to the public. I myself became aware of it only when I visited the neo-Nazi Librairie du Savoir in Paris, which in fact is the book's distributor. It requires a professional librarian to verify the very existence of this item in the OCLC world catalog (not available to the public), or in the catalogue of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (which, to be sure, is available to anyone). It is here, in this official French source, that Said's dirty little secret -- his collaboration with the Nazis -- is laid open for all to see. The item is duly listed, as is Said's introduction to it.

Werner Cohn, April 2001

PS (June 2001): It appears that there is an English edition of the Shahak book that also contains the Said introduction. The edition of Shahak's book advertised by amazon.com says, on its cover, that it has a forword by Said. WC

Some further reading

The classic study of Arab anti-Semitism, published some thirty years ago, is, alas, as valid today as it was in the 1970's: Y. Harkabi, Arab Attitudes to Israel, Jerusalem, 1972

"'My Beautiful Old House' and Other Fabrications by Edward Said," by Justus Reid Weiner, Commentary, September 1999; available for purchase on line through the archives service of Commentary magazine. This article examines Said's claims to be a "Palestinian."

"Said's Splash," Chapter Two of Ivory Towers on Sand, by Martin Kramer, Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 2001. This chapter summarizes the criticisms that scholars have made of Said's book Orientalism, and describes how, despite its intellectual weakness, this work by Said has become a powerful influence on the American academic establishment.

Jewish anti-Semitism. It sounds like a contradiction in terms, an oxymoron or a Jackie Mason joke. If only this were the case.

Jewish anti-Semitism is all around us, part of the political air we breathe, a modern disease. In the twenty-first century the world is experiencing an explosion of it, a virtual plague. Among the most malicious and venomous of all bigots, the Jewish anti-Semites are at the forefront of every smear campaign against Israel and every attempt to cow Jews of America and the West into guilty support for those in the Middle East who would like to annihilate them. Jews today are leaders in the campaigns to boycott and “divest from” Israel, and in the leadership of the “Solidarity with Terrorists” groups. They make pilgrimage to the camps of Hamas and the Hezb’Allah, cheering on terrorists and their atrocities against Jews. They pioneered the smear campaigns to paint Israel as an apartheid regime and to stigmatize it as the moral equivalent to Nazi Germany.

Western campuses are crawling with Jewish anti-Semites. Some even hold leadership positions in Hillel houses. Many others are tenured professors. An anti-Semitic Jewish judge (Richard Goldstone) chaired a UN commission demonizing Israel. A Jewish member of Britain’s Parliament (Gerald Kaufman) compared Hamas terrorists to Jewish fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto and denounced Israel as a Nazi entity. Nor is this only an American phenomenon: a shockingly large number of Jewish anti-Semites are Israelis or ex-Israelis.

Most Jews dismiss such people as “self-hating,” but this term is misleading at best. These rogues do not hate themselves. Indeed they are narcissistic to the core. They hate other Jews and wish them harm. Nor are these Jewish anti-Semites simply assimilationists of Jewish descent who have lost interest in their heritage, become indifferent towards the history of their people and therefore casually alienated from Israel and its travails. On the contrary, anti-Semitic Jews are intensely involved in their “roots” and use them adroitly as protective coloration from which they advance their treasonous notions. In some extreme cases they collaborate with Neo-Nazis, Islamist terrorists, and even Holocaust Deniers.

Jewish anti-Semitism was once considered a bizarre irrelevance. It was touched upon gingerly in the ground breaking 1947 film, “Gentleman’s Agreement,” but long ignored as a marginal psychological disorder by the organized Jewish community. Modern Zionists expected that the very creation of Israel would put an end to any neurotic self-hatred that afflicted Diaspora communities. It was expected to end not only Jewish physical insecurity but also spiritual pathology. A strong and proud Israel, in other words, would shield Jews from a sense of vulnerability and empower them to throw off self denial. Alas, history had a surprise up its sleeve: the growth of a powerful and determined Israel committed to never again allowing Jews to become victims has also enabled some of the very worst Jewish anti-Semites on the planet, all of whom shelter in the radical fringes of the Israeli Left, its academic institutions and its “intelligentsia,” thriving under the protective umbrella of the Israeli Defense Force.

Among the most open Israeli promoters of anti-Semitic mythology today is Professor Shlomo Sand, a hardcore communist on the history faculty of Tel Aviv University. Sand last year published a book with a far-left anti-Israel publisher claiming to prove that Jews are not and never have been a “people.” Recycling myths popularized by Neo-Nazi web sites, Sand’s entire book is a sort of Protocols of the Elders of Anti-Zion, a pseudo-analysis that claims that most Jews today are frauds, converts from the Khazar Turkic tribe, impersonators of Jews. All real Jews, according to the learned professor, became Palestinian Arabs centuries ago. Hence Israeli “Jews” are not Jews at all, certainly none that have a right to their own state.

Sand travels the globe with Tel Aviv University funding to tout his book and advocate the extermination of Israel. He is surpassed in his anti-Semitism only by one other Israeli professor, now retired, named Ariel Toaff, who claimed to have evidence that Jews use gentile blood in religious ritual. Blood libel: one of the foundations of traditional anti Semitism now embraced by Jewish anti Semites. The concept of irony is not spacious enough to encompass such a development. (Other anti-Semitic Israeli academics are cataloged on the web site Isracampus.org.il.)

Just what makes Jewish anti-Semites tick is hard to explain. One of the few people to take a serious stab at doing so is Kenneth Levin, a psychiatrist at Harvard and an occasional contributor to these pages. He thinks of Jewish anti-Semitism in part as an attempt by some Jews to gain social acceptance in an environment that is hostile towards Jews. He also understands it as an infantile attempt to rectify a menacing situation by self-blame, a response seen in small children who have been abused. And he also considers it a kissing cousin to the notorious “Stockholm Syndrome,” whereby victims adopt the outlook and agenda of their victimizers.

Anti-Semitism is today the main common denominator that unites the far-Left with the Neo-Nazi Right in the United States and in Europe. Jewish anti-Semites thrive in the shadowy areas found at both ends of the political spectrum. In the American ultra-Left many serve as columnists for the extremist “Counterpunch” web magazine, published by the ex-Brits Alexander and Andrew Cockburn, sons perpetuating the work of their Stalinist father (and George Orwell enemy) Claud Cockburn. Counterpunch is so openly anti-Semitic these days that it goes well beyond merely calling for Israel’s extermination. It endorses anti-Semitic conspiracy “theories” (such as the morally imbecilic idea that Jews were behind the 9-11 attacks!) and increasingly publishes Holocaust Denier columnists. Some of its columnists moonlight as writers for Neo-Nazi web sites and organizations. Almost every literate Jewish anti-Semite writes for this publication.

On the cyber-pages of Counterpunch, Jewish anti-Semites cheer on the jihad and endorse anti-Jewish terrorism. It would be difficult to find Jewish writers in Counterpunch who are not making the de rigueur comparisons between Israel and Nazi Germany. The University of Wisconsin’s Jennifer Loewenstein, for instance, published “Gaza Holocaust,” in which she writes: “Israel and its US Master have long since resided in the lowest circle of Hell for betraying the name of humanity.” She adds that Israel treats Palestinians as subhuman “Untermenschen,” reminiscent of German treatment of Jews in the Holocaust. Then, in a quote that could easily have been printed by the Nazi newspaper Der Sturmer in the 1930s, she adds: “The Neo-Jewish Masters and their allies in the United States… have no intention of making a just peace with the lower forms of life in their midst.” In Loewenstein’s take on reality, Israel can engage in state terror because it operates a sinister cabal that enslaves the American government and dictates its policies. A new postmodern take on the old racist stereotype of Jews as cagey intriguers.

Another Counterpunch anti-Semite is Richard Falk, a retired professor from Princeton best known for serving on the UN commission that condemned Israel for “genocidal war crimes” even before it began its investigation of Israel’s Gaza operations. Falk is not only one of the worst collaborators in the academics warring against the Jews, he is also America’s leading practitioner of the Orwellian inversion of reality in which Israel is a terrorist aggressor, while the Arab terrorist aggressors are innocent victims and peace-loving progressives. For him, Israel is a Nazi-like country seeking genocide, while the Islamofascists of the Hamas and their backers are merely protesters against social inequality inside Israel. For him, terrorist aggression against Jews is really the pursuit of peace, while self-defense by Israel is genocide.

In 2007 Falk published, “Slouching toward a Palestinian Holocaust,” in which he wrote that it was not an “irresponsible overstatement to associate [Israel’s] treatment of Palestinians” with the Nazi extermination of Jews:

“The recent developments in Gaza are especially disturbing because they express so vividly a deliberate intention on the part of Israel and its allies to subject an entire human community to life-endangering conditions of utmost cruelty. The suggestion that this pattern of conduct is a holocaust-in-the-making represents a rather desperate appeal to the governments of the world and to international public opinion to act urgently to prevent these current genocidal tendencies from culminating in a collective tragedy.”

One of the regular contributors to Counterpunch is an ex-Israeli named Gilad Atzmon. He is a saxophone player living in the UK and closely associated with Neo-Nazi groups in Europe. While active in pro-terror organizations, Atzmon is so openly anti-Semitic that some of these anti-Israel groups shun and refuse to have anything to do with him. The well-known British writer Oliver Kamm has denounced Atzmon as an open Holocaust Denier. Atzmon has called not only for Israel to be annihilated but also for synagogues to be burned down. He heads a small clique of Neo-Nazi followers, mainly in Italy, for whom he serves as cult leader. Atzmon has repeatedly asserted that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion is a historically accurate documentation of the crimes by the Jewish people.

Paul Eisen, another anti-Israel Jewish extremist in the UK, is also an open Holocaust Denier. He has distributed an essay endorsing Holocaust Denial entitled “Holocaust Wars,” which claims – among other things – that the gas chambers of Auschwitz could not possibly have worked to the degree that they did. Among its “sources” are David Irving and the Neo-Nazi crank Ernst Zundel, deported by Canada and now in prison in Germany.

Several Jewish anti-Semites engaged in a bizarre form of Holocaust Denial on the anti-Semitic “ALEF” chat list that operates under the auspices of the University of Haifa in Israel. Members of that list debated at length whether Hitler was actually guilty of anything, concluding that he was probably not. Shraga Elam, a Swiss-based ex-Israeli and a member of the same “ALEF” list, published a sycophantic letter praising Holocaust Denier David Irving as a “brilliant researcher.”

The most venomous Jewish-born Holocaust Denier of all is Israel Shamir. An émigré from the Soviet Union, “Shamir” moved to Israel and later left for Sweden, where he changed his name to Adam Ermash and reportedly converted to Christianity. A vulgar Jewbaiter, he regularly attends Holocaust Denial conferences. As just one example of his poison, in an interview with the Islamist Mohamed Omar in August 2009, Shamir said:

“I think it is the duty of every Muslim and Christian to deny the Holocaust, to reject this belief, just like Abraham and Moses rejected idolatry. Every person who profess [sic] their [sic] faith to God should deny the Holocaust. I think it’s much more serious that people deny God, isn’t it?”

Within Israel, one of the most openly anti-Semitic Jews was the late Professor Israel Shahak, who taught chemistry for decades at the Hebrew University. He insisted that Judaism teaches Jews to worship Satan, to connive against non-Jews and to murder them. He stopped just millimeters short of saying that Jews use gentile blood for ritual purposes. He claimed that the Talmud is filled with calls to murder gentiles, and that Jews regard gentiles as subhuman. He collaborated with Neo-Nazis all over the world. Naturally he wanted Israel to be speedily destroyed, and he was one of the first Israelis to openly collaborate with Palestinian terrorism, long before the Oslo “process” commenced and produced so many others who have emulated him.

In an analysis of Shahak, the British writer Paul Bogdanor notes: “According to Shahak, the Jews think of nothing but making money for the benefit of the Jewish state … According to Shahak, the Jews plan to dominate much of the world through an Israeli empire …“extending [in Shahak’s words] from ‘Algeria or Morocco’ from the west to China in the east, and from Kenya or even South Africa in the south to the USSR in the north… According to Shahak, the Jews facilitate the spread of vice in order to enslave the masses (“Part of the motivation” must be “encouraging drug addiction and thus promoting political apathy”)….”

In other cases prominent Jews endorse Holocaust Deniers while carefully tiptoeing around explicitly endorsing Holocaust Denial itself. The best known of these is Noam Chomsky, an extremist anti-American and anti-Israel professor of linguistics at MIT.

Son of a Hebrew teacher at Gratz College in Philadelphia, Chomsky despises Israel almost as deeply as he hates America. He considers both countries worse than Nazi Germany. Chomsky has campaigned on behalf of the French Holocaust Denier Robert Faurisson and other European Neo-Nazis. He has said in his own defense that he only wants this hate to be protected under laws guaranteeing freedom of speech, but as Professor Werner Cohn has proven, Chomsky also endorses the contents of their speech: “But in fact we saw that [in addition to justifying] …Faurisson’s Holocaust-denial, we found Chomsky publishing his own books with neo-Nazi publishers, we saw him writing for a neo-Nazi journal, we saw that the neo-Nazis promote Chomsky’s books and tapes together with the works of Joseph Goebbels. It is this complex of anti-Semitic activities and neo-Nazi associations, not his professed ideas alone, that constitutes the Chomsky phenomenon.”

Only marginally less openly anti-Semitic is Norman Finkelstein, who had been on the faculty of DePaul University until he was fired three years back (and has been unemployed ever since). Finkelstein has built an entire career out of smearing Holocaust survivors as frauds and liars, and cheering on Islamofascist terrorism against Jews. His personal web site is a vulgar gutter of juvenile anti-Semitic catcalls. He claims that Zionists exaggerate the dimensions of the Shoah to steal money and invent Holocaust survivors to exploit Germany. He has made pilgrimage to the Hezb’Allah terrorists and was denied entry into Israel on grounds that he is a terrorist agent. Finkelstein’s book “The Holocaust Industry” has become a basic text used by all Neo-Nazis and Holocaust Deniers. He has praised Holocaust Denier David Irving as a great and reliable historian. (Irving, in turn, claims the entire Holocaust is a Zionist hoax and that no Jews were murdered in Auschwitz.)

While Finkelstein is a pseudo-academic and a fraud, dismissed as a crackpot by all serious historians, he is nevertheless celebrated by all other Jewish Anti-Semites. One Israeli academic in particular, Neve Gordon, an Israel-hating extremist who teaches political science at Ben Gurion University, has devoted much of his career to celebrating Finkelstein and his “ideas.” When he is not denouncing Israel as a fascist apartheid terrorist regime that needs to be eliminated, Gordon has even compared Finkelstein to the Prophets of the Bible.

The psychosis of Jewish anti-Semitism has no comparable analogue among the nations, making the Jews a therapist’s sui generis. The disease of Jewish anti-Semitism not only illustrates the absence of “normality” among 21st century Jewry, it threatens the very survival of Israel and of Jewish communities around the world. It is a growth industry and it puts a perverse stamp of approval on every genocidal plan conceived by every terrorist sect contemplating the glory that awaits those who murder Jews.

Well this same group of Jews are also the ones who are staunch Democrats, down not only Israel, also the United States, Christianity, capatilism, and at the same time love the concept of big government controlling everything in society and daily life, and are generally marxist, socialist, communist and the rest. Yet many of these same people love money, live like capatilists, and spend their entire lives making sure they "get their pile" (using a description from George Gilder).

Item number one -> George Soros.

I am proud of being Jewish. Yet I despise the political thinking, hypocracy, and naricissism of this particular group of Jews.And I am not afraid to say it. There are other Jews like me including Horowitz, Goldbergs (Bernie and Jonah), Mason etc who know exactly what I am talking about.

Born In The USA…or at least, if not there, bin Laden’s ideas were born in the West.

Not surprising, really. Most ideas that kill millions were born in the West. The West has nurtured both great good, and great evil.

For example, where do you think that Pol Pot got his ideas? In Cambodia? Nope. In Paris. Just the place to marinate in the moldering monstrous themes of Rousseau and the Terror.

While Marx was a westerner, he fermented his deadly memes and wrote his most damaging works in London, a city that has had Marxists as mayor in recent history. Even Mao, perhaps the greatest mass murderer in history, was influenced by him.

What is particularly poisonous about radical Islam is how it has wed the ancient warmongering of Mohammed with more modern totalitarianism (though in a sense, you could say that Mohammed, with his intrinsic melding of religion and state, invented totalitarianism), and how comfortable the left seems to be with it, decrying “apartheid” in Israel, a nation that has Arabs in its legislature, while ignoring the true gender apartheid of the Arab culture. The alliance between the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and national socialism in Germany during the war was not isolated, or a coincidence.

Adversaries have been buying sway in Congress and the public eye by funding American professors who advocate for them, to the tune of $600M.

March 25, 2011 - 12:31 pm - by Clarice Feldman

When educators who are identified as professors from prestigious universities testify before Congress, write op-eds, and appear on public or media sponsored panels, most readers and listeners value their words more than those of others less credentialed. Perhaps this is especially the case when the subject is foreign affairs, which — without warrant — is generally treated as an arcane subject requiring considerable specialized study to fully comprehend.

For this reason, concern is growing that our universities, especially those highly regarded, have been receiving very large sums of cash from abroad, often from countries or citizens of countries which hold positions antithetical to our interests or engage in conduct shocking to our values. This matter is receiving critical attention from both sides of the political spectrum.

The fact of these large gifts is no secret. 20 USC 1011-Sec. 1011f requires colleges and universities to disclose foreign donations and contracts valued at $250,000 or more, and the Department of Education annually posts them online on its website.

Today, the Chronicle of Higher Education published an article by Scott Carlson on the subject (subscription only). Reviewing the latest such report from the DOE (the next is due next month), he notes:

Over the past 10 years, gifts from and contracts with governments, companies, and individuals [in the Middle East] have amounted to more than $600 million.

Qatar is the largest contributor, donating almost half of the total. It is followed by Saudi Arabia, which donated $77 million. I suspect that with the downturn in the American economy these large foreign gifts are being more aggressively sought out and constitute a larger and larger portion of university revenues.

How much of this is known to alumni and students is unclear. If you recall, the videos of the NPR fundraisers (both former university fundraisers) and the make-believe Arabs revealed that they were very willing to do what they could to keep the proposed gift anonymous. They said they had done this before, and even mentioned an $80 million dollar gift — apparently from a domestic giver with a feminist bent — to a number of universities which had successfully been kept under wraps by all the schools concerned. I suspect that a great deal of the foreign funding, though reported as the law requires to the federal government, may not be fully known in university communities.

In any event, word is getting out. As Carlson observes, the initial complaints came from conservatives and those who support Israel, but now the left — which is expressing concern about human rights issues — has joined in. Some of the most well-publicized of these disputes here and in the UK involve unseemly conduct on the part of university officials, but incidents which undermine scholarship are not as well-known.

We may know of Lawrence Tech’s grant of a doctorate to Bahrain’s prime minister, who in turn donated $3 million to the university; or we may know of the scandal at the London School of Economics — the university trained Libyan officials and granted an apparently unearned doctorate to one of the dictator’s sons. (Subsequently, it was learned that Michigan State was also training Gaddafi’s men, and prominent Harvard professors — through a public relations firm of their creation, Monitor — were hiring professors in part to burnish the dictator’s image.) However, although these incidents have had higher profiles, I believe these acts are far less insidious and detrimental to our interests and to the universities’ basic functions than is so much else that this largesse creates on a regular, lower-profile basis.

First, these gifts cannot but distort the research and classroom work of a university. Professors, universities, and the entire university food chain (graduate students, assistant professors, students) all know who has money, and naturally gravitate to those studies and projects for which there is funding. If there is no money to support research in a given area, there can be no fellowships or grants to sustain the scholarship. So teachers read, teach, and write about topics for which funding is available, and students make such topics the object of their study. Time is a scarce resource even in the groves of academe, and smart people do not wish to waste theirs pursuing subjects for which there will be no ability to finance and publicize their endeavors.

Second, can one doubt that there will be a tendency not to offend the donors? It’s possible that Stephen Walt (professor of international relations at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government), a man who was hired to tart up Gaddafi in the public view, might have written this drivel on his own without the money, but one doubts it despite his strong anti-Israel, pro-Arab views:

First, although Libya is far from a democracy, it also doesn’t feel like other police states that I have visited. I caught no whiff of an omnipresent security service — which is not to say that they aren’t there — and there were fewer police or military personnel on the streets than one saw in Franco’s Spain. The Libyans with whom I spoke were open and candid and gave no sign of being worried about being overheard or reported or anything like that. The TV in my hotel room featured 50+ channels, including all the normal news services (BBC World Service, CNN, MSNBC, Bloomberg, Al Jazeera, etc.) along with contemporary U.S. sitcoms like “2-1/2 Men,” shows like “Desperate Housewives,” assorted movies, and one of the various “CSI” clones. A colleague on the trip told me that many ordinary Libyans have satellite dishes and that the government doesn’t interfere with transmissions. I tried visiting various political websites from my hotel room and had no problems, although other human rights groups report that Libya does engage in selective filtering of some political websites critical of the regime. It is also a crime to criticize Qaddafi himself, the government’s past human rights record is disturbing at best, and the press in Libya is almost entirely government-controlled. Nonetheless, Libya appears to be more open than contemporary Iran or China and the overall atmosphere seemed far less oppressive than most places I visited in the old Warsaw Pact.

Benjamin R. Barber, then a senior fellow at Demos (a New York-based think tank focused on the theory and practice of democracy) and now at Rutgers, was also hired by the Harvard-related group to buff up the Libyans. He wrote this bit of treacle:

Written off not long ago as an implacable despot, Gaddafi is a complex and adaptive thinker as well as an efficient, if laid-back, autocrat. Unlike almost any other Arab ruler, he has exhibited an extraordinary capacity to rethink his country’s role in a changed and changing world.

On the other hand, Joseph Nye of Harvard’s Kennedy School didn’t act as a Gaddafi promoter. Upon returning from a trip to Libya, he disclosed his consulting arrangement with Monitor and reported critically on what he saw there. It could well be that the funders — like those who fund two Georgetown University centers run by Professors John L. Esposito and Michael Hudson, two men instinctively critical of the U.S. and Israel and indulgent of the Arabs — are often merely putting money in the pockets of those who already take their side, and are not buying their approval. Mutual attraction, not prostitution, may explain the grants on one side and the product on the other.

Still, by funding these professors the donors are assuring that these professors gain power and prominence within their university and the academic community.

This problem is not confined to foreign gifts. Those who follow the latest politically popular trends — like global warming — get funded by the government; those academics skeptical of it do not. Similarly, when the Annenberg Foundation funds went from that foundation, through Obama, to Bill Ayers, Ayers’ power within the University of Illinois undoubtedly increased, along with his sway in the national educational establishment itself. Still, the notion of foreign governments, especially those who pose national security issues for this nation, buying up or paying off like-minded professors or directing undue scholarship towards a benign reading of matters in their interest is especially troubling.

Aside from monitoring what information is made public, is there anything else that can be done? I think a first step would be for universities to adopt a code of conduct, requiring professors who speak publicly before Congress, in the media, and before public audiences to disclose any foreign funding of which they are the recipients. This hardly seems to be asking a great deal. I believe it is a policy in ordinary use respecting scientific research — I can’t see why this policy merits objection from academia. Increasingly the public is used to and demanding transparency in all our institutions — why should universities and those who run them and work there be exempt? They have a unique ability to shape public opinion, and with that comes a special obligation to be candid about who’s footing the bills.

Well I lived in DC area during the Iran hostage crises and there were thousands of Iranian students in DC at the time. On one side of the streets they would demonstrate "down with the USA" and the other side of the street Americans would scream back at them. I was told the engineering building at GW University was "built" with Iranian money.

And if Iranian money didn't build the GW University engineering building, who would?

Also, as a side note, being an optimist, I like to think foreign students who come here see and hopefully learnto appreciate the freedom and greatness of America; if they only take a few of our ideas homethe world will be better off.

And if Iranian money didn't build the GW University engineering building, who would?

Also, as a side note, being an optimist, I like to think foreign students who come here see and hopefully learnto appreciate the freedom and greatness of America; if they only take a few of our ideas homethe world will be better off.

The problem is, how rarely American ideas are taught in American universities. Instead we have the left's indoctrination machine churning out propaganda more often than not.

Internal emails and faxes document the university’s collusion with the 56-nation Organization of the Islamic Conference to promote criminalizing “Islamophobia.”

June 14, 2011 - 12:10 am - by Patrick Poole

Georgetown University has some explaining to do based on documents obtained exclusively by PJM from a confidential law enforcement source. The documents reveal a scheme to pass $325,000 through the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), which has been identified by the FBI as a front for the Hamas terrorist organization. The money was paid to Georgetown by the 57-nation Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) to promote its “Islamophobia” agenda, which includes its stated international objective of criminalizing any criticism of Islam.

Even more troubling: evidence that Georgetown is not the only American university to cooperate with CAIR and the OIC in their joint plan to subvert the First Amendment right to free speech.

The plot was apparently initiated in 2006 by discussions between the OIC, CAIR, and Georgetown’s Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (CMCU). An email dated November 20, 2006, sent from OIC permanent observer to the UN Abdul Wahab to Nihad Awad and Hadia Mubarak — a CAIR board member and Georgetown CMCU “senior researcher” — urged them to expedite arrangements. The email also promised that funds would be transferred to Georgetown as soon as the OIC received a letter from John Esposito, director of Georgetown’s CMCU.

Abdul Wahab’s email was followed up with a January 11, 2007, joint letter from CAIR Executive Director Nihad Awad and John Esposito, which is referenced in a January 15, 2007, letter of reply from OIC Secretary General Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu (the letter is misdated as 2006). The letter offered $325,000 in cash from the OIC to finance an “Islamophobia” symposium to be convened at Georgetown University.

The OIC is the second largest intergovernmental body in the world behind the United Nations. It comprises every Islamic country in the world at the head of state level. OIC Secretary General Ihsanoglu said last year that the OIC functions as the Islamic global caliphate and embodies the “Islamic solidarity” of the ummah. Included as an agenda item in the OIC’s 10 year plan — stated in English on their own website — is to push for the international criminalization of Islamophobia (1.VII), in defiance of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights protections of freedom of speech and freedom of religion.

Georgetown’s CMCU was endowed in December 2005 by a $20 million grant from Saudi Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal, one of the richest men in the world, who also gave another $20 million for a similar center at Harvard. Back in February 2008, I wrote about the extremist Wahhabi agenda that the center actively promotes. Congressman Frank Wolf has also written to Georgetown President John DeGioia expressing concerns about the potential Saudi influence of U.S. government foreign service personnel trained at the university. Wolf also queried whether the CMCU had ever written anything critical of the Saudis’ abysmal record on human rights, religious freedom, freedom of expression, women’s rights, minority rights, protection of foreign workers, due process, and the rule of law. Needless to say, they haven’t.

John Esposito, the CMCU’s director, described Palestinian Islamic Jihad leader Sami Al-Arian at an August 2007 CAIR fundraiser in Dallas as “a good friend of mine,” even hiring Al-Arian’s son Abdullah as a researcher for the center. Esposito’s protégé, Hadia Mubarak, who now operates as a researcher at the Gallup Poll’s Muslim World project, is a virulent bigot who has gone so far as accusing other Muslims as having “a deep hatred of Islam” for daring to criticize American Islamic organizations and institutions that are Saudi-financed and promote their extremist Wahhabi agenda — such as the Georgetown CMCU.

During the period when this scheme came together, CAIR was named an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation case — the largest terrorism financing trial in American history. Not coincidentally, Esposito served as a defense witness in that trial. His testimony was apparently unpersuasive, as the defendants were convicted on all 108 charges and sentenced to lengthy prison terms. During that trial, FBI Special Agent Lara Burns testified that CAIR was a front for the terrorist group Hamas. Admittedly mirroring the agenda of the OIC, and presumably its aim to criminalize the defamation of Islam, CAIR has established an observatory for “Islamophobia.” CAIR Executive Director Nihad Awad spoke last year at an OIC conference on Islamophobia held in Brazil. Nihad Awad was personally named an unindicted co-conspirator, along with his organization, in the Holy Land Foundation trial and is identified in federal wiretaps of a top-level Hamas meeting held in Philadelphia in 1993.

This symbiotic relationship between the OIC, Georgetown, and CAIR is expressed in their unity to promote the OIC’s “Islamophobia” agenda. But the attempts to pull off the Georgetown conference to that end experienced some setbacks, according to additional documents obtained from our law enforcement source.

A letter dated July 19, 2007, from OIC official Sukru Tujan to Nihad Awad and then-CAIR chairman Parvez Ahmed directed them to transfer $62,100 to Georgetown for costs associated with a scheduled September 20, 2007, workshop and speech at the university by OIC Secretary General Ihsanoglu (his speech can be found on Georgetown’s website). The letter also asked for the prompt return of the remainder of the $325,000 to the OIC, as the conference could not be organized in 2007. The letter notes this arrangement had previously been discussed, probably at the meeting between Awad and Ihsanoglu in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, at OIC headquarters two weeks before where they discussed joint OIC-CAIR projects.

But CAIR chairman Ahmed replied with a letter to Ihsangolu dated July 27, 2007, complaining that returning the remainder of the $325,000 to the OIC would hinder their efforts to organize a joint symposium at a later date. He also noted that they already incurred $19,700 in expenses for the event. A faxed reply from Ihsangolu dated July 20, 2007, cited auditing requirements for the return of the money and concerns that another partner may need to be found, possibly due to CAIR’s legal and media troubles at the time.

Notwithstanding that dispute and the delay in organizing the proposed “Islamophobia” symposium, the three organizations continue to jointly push their shared agenda. Both John Esposito and CAIR-Chicago Executive Director Ahmed Rehab were scheduled to speak at an OIC conference held at the American Islamic College in Chicago last September.

And other American universities have lined up to promote the OIC “Islamophobia” agenda, most recently the University of California, Berkeley, which hosted the “Islamophobia Production and Redefining the Global ‘Security’ Agenda for the 21st Century” just this past April. That UC Berkeley conference was co-sponsored by the OIC’s Islamic Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (IESCO) and CAIR, and featured IESCO representative Papa Toumane Ndiaey and CAIR Executive Director Nihad Awad as speakers.

The documents we are presenting here for the first time put the lie to CAIR’s repeated claims that they have never received foreign funding, and their denials that they promote the extremist agenda of hostile foreign nations. This, however, is hardly breaking news.

That some of America’s top universities are actively colluding with the Islamic foreign governments — most of whom have refused to sign the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights — is troubling enough. But signing onto and openly promoting the OIC’s stated agenda of criminalizing “Islamophobia” puts them in direct opposition to the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment protections, and raises serious questions about their eligibility for public funding.

This is clearly an issue for Congress to investigate immediately.

Patrick Poole is a regular contributor to Pajamas Media, and an anti-terrorism consultant to law enforcement and the military.

"But signing onto and openly promoting the OIC’s stated agenda of criminalizing “Islamophobia” puts them in direct opposition to the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment protections, and raises serious questions about their eligibility for public funding." I thought hate crimes were illegal and not protected by the first amendment....

As for the money....But no, you are saying you should refuse the money right? Huh? These are our "allies" giving us this money. And the schools are desperate. Who else is going to fund them?

Or maybe "This is clearly an issue for Congress to investigate immediately."

What a joke. UCLA and Berkeley are taking MORE foreign students because they need the money versus CA students.I think it's wrong, but where is Congress? And this is far more important than big donations in exchange for a "conference".

But then I guess if it was a Conservative Republican Conference it would ok?

Very smart JDN, quote from John Esposito,. Did you think this might be relevant?"John Esposito, the CMCU’s director, described Palestinian Islamic Jihad leader Sami Al-Arian at an August 2007 CAIR fundraiser in Dallas as “a good friend of mine,” even hiring Al-Arian’s son Abdullah as a researcher for the center. Esposito’s protégé, Hadia Mubarak, who now operates as a researcher at the Gallup Poll’s Muslim World project, is a virulent bigot who has gone so far as accusing other Muslims as having “a deep hatred of Islam” for daring to criticize American Islamic organizations and institutions that are Saudi-financed and promote their extremist Wahhabi agenda — such as the Georgetown CMCU."

"But signing onto and openly promoting the OIC’s stated agenda of criminalizing “Islamophobia” puts them in direct opposition to the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment protections, and raises serious questions about their eligibility for public funding." I thought hate crimes were illegal and not protected by the first amendment....

Although "hate crimes" are another debate, the OIC wants to outlaw "thought crimes" and institute sharia speech laws.

As for the money....But no, you are saying you should refuse the money right? Huh? These are our "allies" giving us this money.

HAMAS is our ally?

And the schools are desperate. Who else is going to fund them?

Or maybe "This is clearly an issue for Congress to investigate immediately."

What a joke. UCLA and Berkeley are taking MORE foreign students because they need the money versus CA students.I think it's wrong, but where is Congress? And this is far more important than big donations in exchange for a "conference".

But then I guess if it was a Conservative Republican Conference it would ok?

And they would NEVER donate money to help their cause....

Yes, HAMAS and Saudi money is exactly the same as a conservative republican conference.

The diference being that the left tolerates and encourages jihadists on campus while working to prevent conservatives from having access.

‘Secularism can never enjoy a general acceptance in an Islamic society.” The writer was not one of those sulfurous Islamophobes decried by CAIR and the professional Left. Quite the opposite: It was Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the Muslim Brotherhood’s spiritual guide and a favorite of the Saudi royal family. He made this assertion in his book, How the Imported Solutions Disastrously Affected Our Ummah, an excerpt of which was published by the Saudi Gazette just a couple of months ago.

This was Qaradawi the “progressive” Muslim intellectual, much loved by Georgetown University’s burgeoning Islamic-studies programs. Like Harvard, Georgetown has been purchased into submission by tens of millions of Saudi petrodollars. In its resulting ardor to put Americans at ease about Islam, the university somehow manages to look beyond Qaradawi’s fatwas calling for the killing of American troops in Iraq and for suicide bombings in Israel. Qaradawi, they tell us, is a “moderate.” In fact, as Robert Spencer quips, if you were to say Islam and secularism cannot co-exist, John Esposito, Georgetown’s apologist-in-chief, would call you an Islamophobe; but when Qaradawi says it, no problem — according to Esposito, he’s a “reformist.” (G M- I guess we could call this "Manufacturing dissent", right?)

And he’s not just any reformist. Another Qaradawi fan, Feisal Rauf, the similarly “moderate” imam behind the Ground Zero mosque project, tells us Qaradawi is also “the most well-known legal authority in the whole Muslim world today.”

Rauf is undoubtedly right about that. So it is worth letting it sink in that this most influential of Islam’s voices, this promoter of the Islamic enclaves the Brotherhood is forging throughout the West, is convinced that Islamic societies can never accept secularism. After all, secularism is nothing less than the framework by which the West defends religious freedom but denies legal and political authority to religious creeds.

It is also worth understanding why Qaradawi says Islam and secularism cannot co-exist. The excerpt from his book continues:

As Islam is a comprehensive system of worship (Ibadah) and legislation (Shari’ah), the acceptance of secularism means abandonment of Shari’ah, a denial of the divine guidance and a rejection of Allah’s injunctions. It is indeed a false claim that Shari’ah is not proper to the requirements of the present age. The acceptance of a legislation formulated by humans means a preference of the humans’ limited knowledge and experiences to the divine guidance: “Say! Do you know better than Allah?” (Qur’an, 2:140) For this reason, the call for secularism among Muslims is atheism and a rejection of Islam. Its acceptance as a basis for rule in place of Shari’ah is downright apostasy.

Apostasy is an explosive accusation. On another occasion, Sheikh Qaradawi explained that “Muslim jurists are unanimous that apostates must be punished.” He further acknowledged that the consensus view of these jurists, including the principal schools of both Sunni and Shiite jurisprudence, is “that apostates must be executed.”

Qaradawi’s own view is more nuanced, as he explained to the Egyptian press in 2005. This, I suppose, is where his vaunted reformist streak comes in. For private apostasy, in which a Muslim makes a secret, personal decision to renounce tenets of Islam and quietly goes his separate way without causing a stir, the sheikh believes ostracism by the Islamic community is a sufficient penalty, with the understanding that Allah will condemn the apostate to eternal damnation at the time of his choosing. For public apostasy, however, Qaradawi stands with the overwhelming weight of Islamic authority: “The punishment . . . is execution.”

The sad fact, the fact no one wants to deal with but which the Ground Zero mosque debate has forced to the fore, is that Qaradawi is a moderate. So is Feisal Rauf, who endorses the Qaradawi position — the mainstream Islamic position — that sharia is a nonnegotiable requirement. Rauf wins the coveted “moderate” designation because he strains, at least when speaking for Western consumption, to paper over the incompatibility between sharia societies and Western societies.

I think conservatives SHOULD have equal access. And equal opportunity to donate money (I hope they do)to our underfunded colleges. Prohibiting either the left or the right is wrong. I LIKE to hear both sides.

So bring on the money, bring on the right, the left, and let the students learn and the college benefit.

And yeah, if I donated 77 million, I expect a say on how it's used. So what else is new?

But don't be absurd and say Congress should investigate because a respected individual or Saudi Arabia, or North Korea, or whomever donatesmillions of dollars to a college. If China donated millions for a Chinese studies program, I'm sure the college would take it too. But somestrings would be attached. That's life.

Or is Congress going to make up the severe money gap at many colleges today?

Elena Kagan, current Solicitor General of The United States and former Dean of the Harvard Law School, exemplifies selective outrage. She knows a lot about "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" when it comes to ROTC on the Harvard Campus, but wears official blinders when it comes to Islamic treatment of homosexuals.

When Professor Kagan ascended to the position of Dean of the Law School, Harvard was in a quandary over military recruitment. Long opposed to the military's policy towards openly gay men and women but ever solicitous of the greenbacks offered by the federal government, the school tried to hedge its bets on the Solomon Amendment, passed in 1994, which required the Secretary of Defense to deny federal grants to institutions of higher learning that prohibited or prevented ROTC or military recruitment on campus. And who better to circumvent the law's intent than the serried ranks of lawyers in Cambridge, Massachusetts? They argued that Washington money should still flow because even though the college placement office was barred to recruiters, ROTC courses could be offered by the Harvard Law School Veterans' Association.

Training on campus was still verboten for Harvard ROTC candidates, and they were forced to travel down the road to MIT to fulfill their training obligations. Too clever by half? Some congressmen thought so, and they responded by fortifying the act in 2001 by passing an amendment that denied all funding -- not just to law schools, but to the entire institution that prohibited or prevented recruiting. Although Dean Kagan did not sign a petition along with many of Harvard's Law School faculty opposing the Solomon Amendment, she did join two amicus briefs in that regard, one submitted to the Supreme Court.

In 2006, The Supreme Court upheld the law, and only two schools refused to comply, thus forfeiting federal largesse. Now, these facts are widely known to the legal community and to many in the country at large. What is not so well-known is Dean Kagan's contemporaneous approval of and promotion of a little-known but richly endowed Harvard Law School program called The Islamic Legal Studies Program. What does all this have to do with Elena Kagan and her principled stand on "Don't Ask, Don't Tell?" It has a lot to do with honesty, integrity, and Harvard's vaunted advocacy for human rights.

The Harvard Islamic Legal Studies Program was made part of Harvard Law School in 1991 with significant funding from distinctly undemocratic sources, mainly from the Gulf States. The program purports to be a research program "that seeks to advance knowledge and understanding of Islamic law." The program works closely with the Harvard Islamic Finance Project, which became an official part of the Law School in 2003, the same year Professor Kagan was awarded the title of Dean.

But is it strictly a "research program"? A few times a year, the directors of the Finance Program take groups of promising Law School and Harvard Business School students to the Middle East on junkets to learn the intricate and arcane practices of Sharia Compliant Finance. Many of these promising students go on to work for such banks and investment firms as the Kuwait Finance House, HSBC Amanah Bank, and the Abu Dhabi Islamic Bank. The intertwined programs, it would seem, go far beyond mere "research" projects. Shariah Finance, it should be noted, is the Islamic approach to investing, mortgage lending, and a host of other money-related practices. Along with its prohibitions on interest accrual and trading in commodities such as pork, alcohol, and gambling is an overarching negative view of homosexuality. Negative, that is, to the point of advocating violence against gays.

Whatever dim views one may hold on the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy of the U.S. Military, the policy pales in comparison to the outright calls to violence enunciated by some of the Islamic world's most prestigious and powerful Shariah advisors.

Case in point: Meet Sheikh Muhammed Taqi Usmani, former appellate court judge in Pakistan, a Deobandi (one of the most extreme Pakistani schools of Islam, associated with the Pakistani Taliban)-trained jurist and chief Shariah advisor to the HSBC Amanah Bank, one of the world's largest and richest banks and one of the sponsors of Harvard's Islamic Finance Project. Among other delightful quotes from Sheikh Usmani:

For a non-Muslim state to have more pomp and glory than a Muslim state itself is an obstacle, therefore to shatter this grandeur is among the greater objectives of jihad (from Islam and Modernism)

Also from Usmani's book: "Killing is to continue until the unbelievers pay jizyah (subjugation tax) after they are humbled or overpowered."

Apparently, these kinds of medieval barbarities did not rise to the level of immorality embodied in the military's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy. At any rate, Dean Kagan never objected to the underlying principles of the program at her law school. Perhaps topics from the program like "Recent Trends and Innovations in Islamic Debt Securities" distracted her from the fundamental discriminatory underpinnings of Sharia Law.

The idea that Harvard Law School would abide such opinions emanating from less well-heeled spokesmen is not even worthy of consideration. Imagine the nation's preeminent law school hosting a program on "white supremacist law and finance." It's all about the money, of course. In addition to the funding of the Islamic Legal Studies Program, other Muslim plutocrats like Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, who dropped twenty million dollars into Harvard's coffers a few years ago, have had a tremendous influence on the university and its culture.

If Sheikh Usmani's views on jihad were not repellent enough, keep in mind that homosexuality has been a crime under Shariah Law in his native Pakistan since 1860. According to that country's penal code, enforced by Judge Usmani, Article 377 states:

Whoever voluntarily has carnal intercourse against the order of nature with any man, woman or animal, shall be punished with imprisonment for life, or with imprisonment of either description for a term which shall not be less than two years nor more than ten years, and shall also be liable to fine. Penetration is sufficient to constitute the carnal intercourse necessary to the offence described in this section.

And here, the chief Shariah Adviser to the sponsors of Harvard's program writes:

It is the same modernity that has engulfed the whole world in the tornado of nudity and obscenity, and has provided an excuse for fornication, and moreso it has led under thunderclaps to the passage of a bill in the British House of Commons to legalize homosexuality (Islam and Modernism).

Suddenly "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" seems pretty benign.

Not only does the Harvard program feature homophobic and "homicidal" clerics, but even the Harvard Muslim Student Chaplain, Taha Abdul-Basser, who has lectured regularly at the Islamic Finance Project, declared apostasy from Islam a capital (not the finance kind) offense:

Abdul-Basser wrote that there was "great wisdom (hikma) associated with the established and preserved position (capital punishment [for apostates]) and so, even if it makes some uncomfortable in the face of the hegemonic modern human rights discourse, one should not dismiss it out of hand (The Harvard Crimson April 14, 2009).

Dean Kagan's reticence about these programs at her own law school should raise serious questions of integrity, sincerity, forthrightness, and ultimately, honesty.

I interrupt GM's schooling of JDN to express a moment of exasperation. (sorryJDN, that's how I see it ) GM, I love you man, but does this series of posts really belong in this thread? Hint: the correct answer is NO. This could properly belong in the Educatin thread on SCH forum or Cog. Dis. of the Left on this forum, or Ialam in America , , , but it really does not belong here.

Well Crafty I think there is a continuity to this thread, meaning that the anti-Israel indoctrination you find in academia isn't accidental. Although the left hates Israel as it hates the rest of the west, the jihadist money buying scholars has a real impact on Israel along with the "Pallywood" propaganda mindlessly parrotted by the global media.

Look at all the praise for Noam Chomsky from Andrew, who I'm guessing was utterly unaware of the ugly truths about this very influential figure in academic circles. And he's supposed to be the scholar.

It is doubtful that there has ever been a more miserable human refuse than Jewish survivors after World War II. Starving, emaciated, stateless—they were not welcomed back by countries where they had lived for generations as assimilated and educated citizens. Germany was no place to return to and in Kielce, Poland, 40 Jews who survived the Holocaust were killed in a pogrom one year after the war ended. The European Jew, circa 1945, quickly went from victim to international refugee disaster.

Yet within a very brief time, this epic calamity disappeared, so much so that few people today even remember the period. How did this happen in an era when Palestinian refugees have continued to be stateless for generations?

In 1945, there were hundreds of thousands of Jewish survivors living in DP Camps (displaced persons) across Europe. They were fed and clothed by Jewish and international relief organizations. Had the world's Jewish population played this situation as the Arabs and Palestinians have, everything would look very different today.

To begin with, the Jews would all still be living in these DP camps, only now the camps would have become squalid ghettos throughout Europe. The refugees would continue to be fed and clothed by a committee similar to UNRWA—the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (paid for mostly by the United States since 1948). Blessed with one of the world's highest birth rates, they would now number in the many millions. And 66 years later, new generations, fed on a mixture of hate and lies against the Europeans, would now seethe with anger.

Sometime in the early 1960s, the Jewish leadership of these refugee camps, having been trained in Moscow to wreak havoc on the West (as Yasser Arafat was) would have started to employ terrorism to shake down governments. Airplane hijackings in the 1970s would have been followed by passenger killings. There would have been attacks on high-profile targets as well—say, the German or Polish Olympic teams.

By the 1990s, the real mayhem would have begun. Raised on victimhood and used as cannon fodder by corrupt leaders, a generation of younger Jews would be blowing up buses, restaurants and themselves. The billions of dollars extorted from various governments would not have gone to the inhabitants of the camps. The money would be in the Swiss bank accounts of the refugees' famous and flamboyant leaders and their lackies.

So now it's the present, generations past the end of World War II, and the festering Jewish refugee problem throughout Europe has absolutely no end in sight. The worst part of this story would be the wasted lives of millions of human beings in the camps—inventions not invented, illnesses not cured, high-tech startups not started up, symphonies and books not written—a real cultural and spiritual desert.

None of this happened, of course. Instead, the Jewish refugees returned to their ancestral homeland. They left everything they had in Europe and turned their backs on the Continent—no "right of return" requested. They were welcomed by the 650,000 Jewish residents of Israel.

An additional 700,000 Jewish refugees flooded into the new state from Arab lands after they were summarily kicked out. Again losing everything after generations in one place; again welcomed in their new home.

In Israel, they did it all the hard way. They built a new country from scratch with roads, housing and schools. They created agricultural collectives to feed their people. They created a successful economy without domestic oil, and they built one of the world's most vibrant democracies in a region sadly devoid of free thought.

Yes, the Israelis did all this with the financial assistance of Jews around the world and others who helped get them on their feet so they could take care of themselves. These outsiders did not ignore them, or demean them, or use them as pawns in their own political schemes—as the Arab nations have done with the Palestinians.

I imagine the argument will be made that while the Jews may have achieved all this, they did not have their land stolen from them. This is, of course, a canard, another convenient lie. They did lose property all over Europe and the Mideast. And there was never an independent Palestine run by Palestinian Arabs. Ever. Jews and Arabs lived in this area controlled first by the Turks and then by the British. The U.N. offered the two-state solution that we hear so much about in 1947. The problem then, and now, is that it was accepted by only one party, Israel. No doubt, the situation of Arab residents of the Middle East back then may have been difficult, but it is incomprehensible that their lot was worse than that of the Jews at the end of World War II.

We don't hear about any of this because giving human beings hope and purpose doesn't make great copy. Squalor, victimhood and terror are always more exciting. Perhaps in the end, the greatest crime of the Jews was that they quietly created something from nothing. And in the process, they transformed themselves.

Golda Meir is credited with having said that if the Jews had not fought back against the Arab armies and had been destroyed in 1948, they would have received the most beautiful eulogies throughout the world. Instead, they chose to stand their ground and defend themselves. And in winning, they received the world's condemnation. Meir said she would take the condemnation over the eulogies.

Mr. Kozak is the author of "LeMay: The Life and Wars of General Curtis LeMay" (Regnery, 2009).